President Donald Trump wants to move on from the recent controversy surrounding the Department of Justice and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Most Republicans in Congress seem eager to stay out of it, too.
“I’ll leave that up to DOJ and the FBI,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters on Monday. “I think that’s in their purview. And the president expressed his views on it. So I’ll just leave it at that.”
Speaker Mike Johnson also told reporters on Monday that he has faith in Bondi and the administration.
“The White House has a lot more information about that than I’m privy to, so I’ll trust they’ll make the right decision, and I think they will,” he said.
When CNN asked Johnson if he still has faith in Bondi, he said he did.
The two Republican leaders were joined by more than a dozen rank-and-file Republicans in both chambers, who told NOTUS Monday evening that they weren’t paying attention to the drama.
“I’m still reviewing all the relevant information, so I’m not judging one way or another,” staunch Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told NOTUS, though she said she would “like to see more information come out and I think the people are right to demand it.”
Another Senate Republican said folks who are concerned about it should care more about the reconciliation bill that the GOP passed two weeks ago.
“You know what’s so funny about that? I understand there’s a big hullabaloo about that among people who are not engaged so much with the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill,’ so they’re engaged with the Epstein thing,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis told NOTUS. “I was just the opposite; I’m looking prospectively, not retroactively.”
Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, also said he was watching to see if the Trump administration does anything.
“At least there’s a genuine effort to sort of get to the bottom of it, but other than that, I’m watching with the rest of us,” he said Monday.
That “genuine effort” to get to the bottom of the names on Epstein’s so-called “files” is at the center of the drama surrounding Trump and the DOJ.
But Issa criticized the media for focusing on the issue.
When NOTUS asked Issa if the public deserved more transparency on the files, he said it was “inherently salacious that the public, and yourself included, love the idea.”
Some Republicans don’t seem to get why this is even an issue.
Rep. Mike Lawler said on CNN Monday that he didn’t “understand frankly why we’re spending a lot of time on Jeffrey Epstein.”
“At the end of the day, if there are people who were part of any crimes, then they should be prosecuted,” Lawler said. “But in the absence of that, what exactly are we looking to do? The information is there. It is well-documented what he did, and beyond that, what exactly are we looking for?”
But not every Republican was so dismissive of the growing calls for more transparency from the administration.
For one, Sen. Mike Lee suggested that there may be “a tiny few” in Congress opposed to Ghislaine Maxwell testifying before lawmakers. “But we shouldn’t assume it’s anything more than that — especially until we know who these people are,” Lee wrote on X.
Other Republicans also said they understood why voters would want more information.
“It’s perfectly understandable that the American people would like to know who he trafficked those women to and weren’t prosecuted,” Sen. John Kennedy said Monday. “I think that the Justice Department is going to have to go back to the drawing board and answer those questions for the American people.”
Rep. Doug LaMalfa told NOTUS he’d be “disappointed if that’s the end of it.”
“Because it sure seems like there’s a lot of smoke there to have no fire,” LaMalfa said.
LaMalfa added that Maxwell, Epstein’s co-conspirator, was in jail for a reason. “And it doesn’t matter who is going to be caught in it, on any side, because that’s heinous,” he said.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who has been a key Republican pushing on the issue, posted on X last week that “the American people deserve to know the truth.”
“The American people should be free to come to their own conclusions. The Truth will always come out one way or another,” she wrote.
Luna was less forthcoming Monday night. She told NOTUS that she’d already made her statements online. “I’m a big advocate for transparency, and that’s why I made my statements online publicly,” she said.
After saying he would release available documents related to Epstein and his supposed client list during the campaign, Trump has resisted making information available. After Bondi said she had documents like that on her desk, she now says they don’t exist. Trump, meanwhile, seemed to suggest Saturday night that documents do exist, when he posted on Truth Social that Democrats created “the Epstein files.”
“Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it?” wrote Trump, who has flown on Epstein’s plane, according to flight logs.
The public doesn’t seem to be so convinced. Trump’s approval rating has fallen six points since June, according to recent polls. And the situation is creating a real rift among Republicans.
Democrats are already capitalizing on the controversy.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is blaming conservatives for escalating the issue, telling reporters that “extremists have been fanning the flames for the last several years, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.”
“The American people deserve to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as it relates to this whole sordid Jeffrey Epstein matter,” Jeffries said.
Other Democrats are jumping on the issue too. A person close to Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary committee, said he plans to send a letter this week to Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan urging him to bring Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Bondi and FBI deputy director Dan Bonigno to testify on the Epstein files.
Texas Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey introduced a resolution that calls for the immediate release of all unclassified files on Epstein, becoming the first Democrat to do so. The resolution is not privileged, which means it’ll likely never get a vote on the House floor.
Also, California Rep. Ro Khanna is set to file an amendment to the GENIUS Act, a cryptocurrency bill that will be marked up by the House Rules Committee. It would require Bondi to preserve records of Epstein, per the finalized text of the amendment.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a staunch Trump ally who blamed the Epstein drama on the Biden administration, summed up his feelings to NOTUS: “I spend more time worrying about what color my boots are than I do about what happens with the Epstein files.”
“I know this for sure: I’m not on his file. I was never in his plane,” he said.