Why Trump Made a Sudden 180 on Releasing Epstein Files

Donald Trump has changed his mind and now wants House Republicans to vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The president announced his reversal on Truth Social Sunday night, saying, “We have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party, including our recent Victory on the Democrat ‘Shutdown.’”

Why the sudden flip-flop, especially since House Republicans have been trying to delay a vote to force the release of the Epstein files for months? Well, after the House Oversight Committee released pages and pages of damaging correspondence from the Epstein estate, Trump feels as though he’s going to lose anyway. House GOP leadership was already projecting that as many as 100 Republicans could vote to release the files.

By agreeing now, Trump is trying to get ahead of the release and placate his fellow Republicans, who have no defensible reason to keep blocking the files with their base clamoring for their release. Over the past week, emails and text messages have revealed that Trump was very close to Epstein in recent years, despite his many denials. Trump is eager for the stories to end and the issue to fade out of news coverage, and now he wants to rip off the Band-Aid.

“The House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE! All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT,” his Truth Social post said.

It’s a rare instance that the president has caved to pressure from Congress, and shows some cracks in his control over the GOP. What happens now? Will Senate Republicans also vote to release the files? And what is in the files that the president has fought so hard to keep hidden?

Outspoken GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene says she has received multiple threats of doxing and violence, and she directly blames President Trump and his “dog whistle” rhetorical attacks for endangering the lives of her and her family. 

The jabs became more serious  last Friday, as Trump announced that he’d be “withdrawing” his support from Greene after she pressed for the Jeffrey Epstein files to be released in full, broke with Trump on inflation and affordability, and criticized his foreign policy decisions on bailing out Argentina and bankrolling Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. 

“All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” Trump wrote Friday, claiming that Greene was only publicly disagreeing with him because he told her not to run for senate or governor in her home state of Georgia, which Greene denies. 

Over the next few days, Trump went on to say that Greene (who he called “Marjorie Taylor Brown” because of green turning brown when it rots) “betrayed the entire Republican Party when she turned Left” and that she was a fake Republican, a “traitor,” and a “disgrace” to the “great Republican party.” 

Greene was quick to respond. 

“I stood with President Trump when almost no one else would. I campaigned for him all over this country and spent millions of my own dollars helping him get elected,” she said Sunday on CNN. “That’s why being called a ‘traitor’ isn’t just hurtful, it puts a target on my back and puts my life in danger.”

Greene elaborated on that danger in a post on X later that same evening. 

“The hoax pizza deliveries have started now, to my house and my family members. Update: we also received a pipe bomb threat on my construction companies office building. President Trump’s unwarranted and vicious attacks against me were a dog whistle to dangerous radicals that could lead to serious attacks on me and my family,” Greene wrote. “Unfortunately, I’ve been down this road before. As a matter of fact, as I campaigned all over the country and defended President Trump, I received dozens of swatting calls on my house and my family members homes along with these hoax pizza deliveries, but even more severely I have received some of the most death threats of any Member of Congress that led to multiple men being convicted and serving time in prison. And all of that came from the left.

“Now that President Trump has called me a traitor, which is absolutely untrue and horrific. Mark Levin has been calling me a traitor. And so have other prominent likely paid social medial activists. This puts blood in the water and creates a feeding frenzy. And it could ultimately lead to a harmful or even deadly outcome.”

The president had no regard for Greene’s fear. 

“Wacky Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown (Remember, Green turns to Brown where there is ROT involved!) is working overtime to try and portray herself as a victim when, in actuality, she is the cause of all of her own problems,” he wrote on Truth Social. “The fact is, nobody cares about this Traitor to our Country!”

Trump is no stranger to inciting violence through rhetoric, but this is a significant shift given how loyal Greene was to Trump and the MAGA agenda. Still, she has no intention of dropping her push for the release of the Epstein files.

“I stand with these women, I stand with rape victims, I stand with children who are in terrible sex abuse situations, and I stand with survivors of trafficking,” Greene said on CNN. “I will not apologize for that. I believe the country deserves transparency in these files. And I don’t believe that rich powerful people should be protected if they have done anything wrong.” 

President Donald Trump’s obsessive focus on deporting immigrants has led to extreme changes at the Department of Homeland Security and undermined efforts to combat child exploitation and sex trafficking, a new report found.

According to The New York Times, the department has been forced to shift its priorities and sideline other important law enforcement activities to make way for the president’s agenda.

Agents investigating sexual crimes against children have been temporarily reassigned, a national security probe into the Iranian black market slowed and lost momentum, and agents working on sex trafficking issues have been forced to pause their work in order to support the Trump administration’s deportation goals. Even the Coast Guard has been pulled in to aid the deportation work, the Times reported.

The new data that the report is based on comes from previously unseen internal DHS documents, and interviews with more than 60 officials.

People inside the agency spoke of being “berated” by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller for not arresting enough people. Yet the Trump administration’s extensive focus on immigration hasn’t played out the way they might have imagined. Less than 40 percent of people ICE arrests carry criminal convictions, the report says.

The Trump administration’s pressure campaign extended to all parts of the agency.

As of August, there are currently more than 60,000 people being detained by DHS, and the Trump administration has shown no signs of pulling back anytime soon.

While so many government agencies have been gutted, depriving Americans of much needed aid and assistance, DHS has received a hefty funding boost. ICE is expected to grow its staff by 66 percent over the next few years.

Hany Farid, a computer scientist who worked on software that detects child sexual abuse materials and aids law enforcement, told Times reporters that it was heartbreaking. “You can’t say you care about kids when you’re diverting actual resources that are protecting children,” he said.

The internet had a field day this week when the House Oversight Committee released thousands of billionaire child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s emails to the public—including an exchange with his brother Mark that seemingly referred to Donald Trump performing fellatio on someone named “Bubba.”

Now, Mark Epstein has come out to remove a modicum of the mystery surrounding the remark, by revealing who Bubba is not.

In the message in question, from March 2018, Mark Epstein told his brother to ask former Trump adviser Steve Bannon whether Russian President Vladimir Putin “has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.”

Jeffrey Epstein replied, “and i thought- I had tsuris,” using the Yiddish word for “troubles.”

Because “Bubba” is a nickname for Bill Clinton—who, like Trump, had a relationship with Epstein—social media was awash with jokes and speculation that Mark Epstein was, in jest or not, describing kompromat depicting the current and former presidents.

Mark Epstein issued a statement Saturday, shared online by Business Insider’s Jacob Shamsian, which described the emails as “simply part of a humorous private exchange between two brothers.”

“For the avoidance of doubt, the reference to ‘Bubba’ in this correspondence is not, in any way, a reference to former President Bill Clinton,” the statement continues. “Any attempt to conflate that reference with President Clinton, or to read sweeping implications into them, misrepresents both the purpose and the tone of the original correspondence.”

But while clarifying the unserious nature of the message, the statement leaves the true identity of Bubba unknown.

Senator Bill Cassidy gave a puzzling answer about his role in placing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services.

During a Sunday appearance on Face The Nation, moderator Margaret Brennan asked if Cassidy—a physician whose support of vaccines has put him at odds with Kennedy—regrets his February confirmation vote.

Brennan observed that Cassidy decided to vote for Kennedy after receiving assurance that a key CDC vaccine advisory committee would be maintained “without changes”; Kennedy went on to fire all of its members, anyway, and appoint new ones, including vaccine skeptics, in their place.

In lieu of an answer, Cassidy offered the following gem: “You live life forward. Again, you just do,” he said, going on to quote Matthew 6:34. “Let the day’s own troubles be sufficient for the day.”

The senator continued, “He and I have publicly disagreed on some matters, but I strongly agree with him on others, and so, so that’s how I’ll answer your question.”

“That sounds, um, like yes,” Brennan noted.

Online, social media users mocked Cassidy’s enigmatic comments. “Translation: Yes, but I’ll pretend it’s a philosophical riddle,” wrote one. “Cassidy sounds like a fortune cookie,” posted another.

Before giving his nonanswer, Cassidy noted that “every reporter asks me that.” One would think he’d have a better response by now.