WASHINGTON — The U.S. House voted nearly unanimously on Tuesday to force the Justice Department to release documents and investigative materials on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The U.S. Senate has also agreed to pass the bill by unanimous consent, although without a rollcall vote. With that, all three members of the Alaska delegation support it.
Rep. Nick Begich, R-Alaska, said he would have voted yes even if President Trump was still urging Republicans to vote no.
“The American people deserve transparency,” Begich said. “This (investigation) is a product of the taxpayers’ investment. A lot of money has gone in to investigate these crimes, and I think the people deserve to know what's there.”
The bill had languished since July, but its sudden speed shows just how much President Trump can whipsaw Congress.
For months, Trump pressed Republicans to block the Epstein bill. That put congressional Republicans in a political bind: Should they follow Trump, or heed the Republican base still clamoring for the files?
Trump abruptly abolished that dilemma. He reversed course over the weekend and said Republicans should vote for it.
Still, House Speaker Mike Johnson took issue with it, saying just before passage it didn’t do enough to shield the identities of victims and witnesses. Begich agreed and said he hoped the Senate would amend it.
“Obviously, we want to make sure that we're protecting the victims, we're protecting the innocent,” Begich said.
Democrats and the four House Republicans who persistently fought to advance the Epstein bill feared amendments would weaken it. They say it already protects victims and witnesses.
The Senate made no changes and agreed to pass it.
Alaska’s U.S. senators have a mixed record on the Epstein files. They’ve said they favor making them public, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted in July in a committee to mandate that in an appropriations bill.
But in September, she and Sen. Dan Sullivan voted with most Republicans to shelve an amendment that would have released the Epstein files. Murkowski said that’s because it would have killed the underlying bill, the National Defense Authorization Act.
“What we were trying to do was to keep a poison pill off of the NDAA. And we did just that,” she said Tuesday.
The Epstein measure was a poison pill in September, Murkowski said, because Trump was fiercely opposed to it at the time and House Republicans would not have allowed it.
Murkowski said she became a co-sponsor of the Senate version of the Epstein transparency bill, but only this week — a change so recent that the public record didn’t reflect it as of Tuesday night. She said she wanted to sign onto it last week, but Congress was out of session. The Senate bill was introduced July 30. Murkowski said she didn’t become a sponsor then because she thought the bill would come from the House.
Sullivan released a statement saying he has long called for the Justice Department to reveal as much information on Epstein’s crimes as possible, as long as victims remain protected.
Editor’s note: The story has been updated to reflect the Senate agreement and the Alaska senators’ remarks.
