House Speaker Mike Johnson is accusing Democrats of turning the Jeffrey Epstein files into a political cudgel while insisting President Trump has nothing to fear from whatever documents get released.
“President Trump has clean hands. He’s not worried about it. I talk to him all the time. He has nothing to do with this. He’s frustrated that they’re turning it into a political issue,” Johnson told Shannon Bream on Fox News Sunday. He didn’t stop there, adding, “And it’s not surprising because the Democrats have nothing else to talk about. What have they accomplished in months? Epstein is their entire game plan.”
The renewed push to release Epstein-related files has been building for months, led by an unlikely pair: Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, and Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican. Their bipartisan discharge petition secured enough signatures last week to force a vote—something that’s put pressure on Republicans who are trying to shield Trump from any guilt-by-association narratives.
Johnson accused Democrats of deliberately leaking “selective material” to make Trump look complicit. He claimed they “cherry-picked three emails out of 20,000 documents” in an effort “to try to imply that the president was guilty,” referring to emails Democrats released in which Epstein told associates that “of course” Trump knew about his relationships with underage girls.
But Khanna isn’t backing down. On Meet the Press, he argued that Trump’s base is peeling away because of how he’s handled the controversy.
“You know why Trump is losing his MAGA base on this?” Khanna said to Kristen Welker. “The reason he’s losing it is he ran saying, ‘There’s a corrupt governing elite that has shafted you,’ that ‘this is the Epstein class versus forgotten Americans, and I’m going to stand up for forgotten Americans.’ He’s forgotten those forgotten Americans. And we are saying that we are going to stand up for survivors, for America’s kids, and we’re going to hold this class accountable.”
The clash highlights just how politically explosive the Epstein documents have become. Democrats see an opportunity to force transparency and keep pressure on Trump. Republicans say the whole thing is a coordinated hit job aimed at shaming Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.
Watch the video below:
