House completely shuts down to avoid Epstein vote

“It is extraordinary that they’re so scared shitless over these Epstein files that they’ve done something that I’ve never seen happen before," Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said Tuesday.

Well, the good news for House Republicans is that summer recess has unexpectedly started early. They don’t have to vote on anything more this week or do any governing at all until September, which will surely come as a relief to them. They can all put on their little pastel lobster shorts, pop their collars and flitter off to Nantucket to be openly racist and continue to neglect their kids.

The bad news is that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had to shut down the House early this week and grind legislation to halt because two congressmen on the Rules Committee, Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), were about to force a vote on releasing the Epstein documents, which Johnson cannot allow to happen for reasons that are becoming less and less mysterious to all of us. “It is extraordinary that they’re so scared shitless over these Epstein files, that they’ve done something that I’ve never seen happen before. I mean, basically they just shut down for the week,” House Rules Committee ranking member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) told reporters today.

As I wrote last week, Trump’s about-face on the “Epstein list” he had promised to release during his campaign has thrown MAGA into absolute chaos, and his handling of the crisis has become exponentially messier since then in ways that I would love to recount for you here. First, there was a heavy distraction phase in the first few days after MAGA’s implosion, wherein Trump threw a bunch of shit at the wall to see if anything could change the subject. These items included:

• Randomly releasing hundreds of thousands of documents related to the MLK assassination (against Martin Luther King, Jr.’s family’s wishes) and saying look how transparent we are!

• Announcing Trump has a vein condition causing his cankles

• Having Tulsi Gabbard release an “intelligence report” about Obama and Russia in 2016 that no one cares about, which they’re now trying to spin into a “years-long coup against President Trump” that will require Obama’s arrest and imprisonment

• Threatening to revoke Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship

• Demanding the Washington Commanders change their name back to the Redskins, just to be racist

Not only did none of this work to make people forget about Epstein, but the Wall Street Journal then hilariously published the “bawdy” contents of a 2003 birthday note that Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein in which he basically admits to being a fellow pedophile. According to the report, Trump drew an outline of a naked woman on the card, signed “Trump” below the woman’s waist in squiggly letters to look like pubic hair, and wrote the following imagined conversation between himself and Epstein inside the sketch:

Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

The secret he’s referencing, in case it isn’t abundantly clear to everyone reading the words “never age,” is that Trump and Epstein both assault young girls. If you need a reminder of Trump himself admitting to being a pedophile, here’s this:

Trump, of course, vehemently denied having written that note to Epstein, claiming that he doesn’t ever draw or doodle (he does) and that that’s not how he normally speaks (it is). And then he sued the WSJ for $10 billion in one of the funniest defamation lawsuits I’ve ever seen in my life. Firstly, $10 billion is an absurdly high number—the largest amount ever awarded in a defamation suit was $1.5 billion in the Sandy Hook kids’ parents’ case against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. A jury is not going to tell a newspaper to pay the president $10 billion for publishing his birthday card to a sex trafficker.

But what’s funnier is that Trump’s lawyer seems to have no idea what an “exclusive” story is, confusing it for a story that is not supposed to be read by…anyone. I’ve copied the line from the lawsuit here:

The only explanation for this bizarrely stupid argument is that Trump and his attorney are confusing an exclusive—which means the reporter is the first and only person to have the story—with the kind of “catch and kill” scheme he had with the National Enquirer during his 2015 campaign. NPR’s explanation of that:

David Pecker, former publisher for the National Enquirer, took the stand for a second day of testimony. Pecker explained that starting in 2015 he, Michael Cohen and Donald Trump had a deal that involved the National Enquirer buying negative stories about Trump and never publishing them – an arrangement also known as 'catch and kill.' Pecker said this was done to help Trump with his 2016 campaign. In addition, he described planting negative stories about Trump's 2016 rivals, such as the Clintons, then presidential candidate Ted Cruz and other Republican front runners.

If Trump is used to dealing with conservative newspapers in this way, it makes sense that he might have thought Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ would be open to the same kind of deal. That the Journal seems to have some real reporters and editors left in its newsroom is as surprising to me as it is to the president, given the current state of corporate media.

So not only is Trump almost certainly going to lose this defamation case, but in the process of bringing this to court, he’s also trapped himself into potentially having more of his incriminating communications with Epstein exposed via “discovery.” And the judge he happened to draw in Southern Florida is an Obama appointee as well as the first openly gay Black federal judge in the country, which I’m sure the president is not going to publicly complain about until the end of time.

And that brings us to this week: The House of Representatives has essentially shut down in order to protect Trump from having whatever Epstein documents exposed that he decided not to release. This, in itself, has had a kind of Streisand Effect on people who didn’t give a shit about the “Epstein files” before but now have pretty clear reason to suspect Trump is in them. And just when I thought the administration couldn’t do anything to throw more suspicion on themselves, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced on X this morning that he’s going to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison to see what she knows.

“I anticipate meeting with Ms. Maxwell in the coming days. Until now, no administration on behalf of the Department had inquired about her willingness to meet with the government,” Blanche wrote. “That changes now.”

Why only now, Mr. Blanche? Is it because Trump is planning to dangle a pardon or a reduced sentence in exchange for Maxwell signing a piece of paper saying he didn’t assault any girls on Epstein’s island? Are we going to see a hostage-style video in which Ghislaine holds up today’s newspaper and shrieks, “Bill Clinton acted alone,” before evaporating into the ether? All I know for certain is that Trump has now taken his and Epstein’s “wonderful little secret,” poured gasoline on it, lit it on fire and flung it around at himself and fellow Republicans like napalm.