Common thread: populism and economic strain

I came back from the UK expecting to ease into the week, and instead I walked straight into one of the wildest legislative twists I have seen in years. The Epstein files bill (HR 4405) cleared the House by way of a discharge petition and did so with only a single vote against it. I’ll admit — did not take this seriously when it first appeared. I assumed it would stall in committee or die somewhere between the House and Senate. And now that I’m holding the text of the bill in my hands, it is obvious that this is very real and very close to becoming law. Donald Trump has already said he will sign it, and with a nearly unanimous House vote, it’s hard to imagine the Senate blocking it.

This portion of our story really begins last Tuesday when House Democrats released a new batch of Epstein related emails. The headline was an email in which Epstein told an associate that Donald Trump knew about his behavior and had spent time at his house with a girl later identified as Virginia Giuffre, though crucially, this email did not accuse Trump of participating in abuse. However, with the House reopened and Adelita Grijalva finally sworn in as its newest member, the discharge petition managed to mass on the exact same day — despite reports that Trump immediately called people like Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace urging them to pull their signatures.

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Trump’s reaction also says a lot here. On Thursday, Trump was furious, calling allies to warn them that he would rescind endorsements if they voted for the petition. The White House framed the anger as frustration that Republicans had given Democrats a politically useful victory. But by Friday, Trump reversed himself and said everyone should support the release since there was nothing to hide. Late Sunday, he doubled down again, telling reporters the files were long overdue and that Pam Bondi should open new investigations into Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and Reid Hoffman. It was at that point that it became obvious that the bill was going to sail through. Even Speaker Mike Johnson voted for it — an unusual action considering discharge petitions are mechanisms designed to bypass the Speaker.

The bill itself is sweeping. It orders the Attorney General to turn over internal DOJ communications related to charging decisions, investigations, destruction of records, detention details, and Epstein’s death. It blocks the government from withholding records due to embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity. Only material that qualifies as child sexual abuse imagery or details an active investigation can be withheld.

The winners in all of this are obvious. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna get enormous credit for pushing the discharge petition from the beginning. They stared down the White House and they won. The losers are just as clear. Trump took the biggest political hit because this never needed to become a fight in the first place. If he wanted the files released he could have released them. The notion that people like Kash Patel and Pam Bondi were acting on their own is nonsense. They do not freelance on something this sensitive. Trump might be trying to rewrite the narrative, but the timeline speaks for itself.

Personally, I think the files have never been released because the conclusion reached is messy rather than clean. We know Epstein abused underage girls. We know Ghislaine Maxwell helped facilitate it. The open question is whether other powerful people committed crimes that can be clearly proved. If the files contain only partial hints or ambiguous associations, releasing them will satisfy no one. People will assume something is missing, especially considering just how conspiratorial this entire story feels. People build their own conclusions in the absence of official clarity, as we’ve seen since the death of Epstein himself.

Still, the fact remains that this administration took an enormous and unnecessary political loss by fighting transparency that it had promised during the campaign. They went from inviting influencers to the White House for binders labeled Phase One to issuing a one page memo suggesting there was nothing further to see. We do not know what will emerge when the full set of records is released. We do know that the political consequences of this episode are locked in place. Everyone who pushed for transparency won. Everyone who resisted it lost. And once the documents are public nobody will be able to put the lid back on whatever comes next.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Intro

00:03:38 - Epstein Files

00:20:44 - Update

00:22:36 - Saudi Crown Prince

00:26:51 - Texas Maps Blocked

00:28:09 - Tariff Checks

00:31:10 - UK Politics, AI, and More with Tom Merritt

01:09:36 - Wrap-up

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