- More than 100 House members had signed Rep. Thomas Massie's new discharge petition as of September 4 — up sharply from the roughly three dozen signatures on file just days earlier, though the effort remains well short of the 218 needed to force a vote.
- The follow-up bill, the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, would let survivors, state attorneys general and members of Congress sue the Justice Department over withheld or redacted Epstein records, building on the original law Congress passed 427-1 last November.
- Massie says he now needs just two more Republicans, since Rep. Nancy Mace has already signed alongside him. The outgoing Kentucky congressman, who lost his primary in what trackers called the priciest House race in U.S. history, says he's willing to wait for a lame-duck session if leadership stalls past November.
Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie is trying to repeat a maneuver that already forced one law out of a reluctant Congress. On the night of Monday, August 31, the outgoing lawmaker filed a fresh discharge petition, this time aimed at a follow-up bill that would let Epstein survivors, state officials and members of Congress drag the Justice Department into court over records federal officials have yet to hand over.
Nearly a year has passed since a nearly identical push produced the original Epstein Files Transparency Act, which cleared the House by a lopsided 427-1 margin and became law when President Trump signed it on November 19, 2025. That earlier fight also relied on a discharge petition, the parliamentary shortcut that lets rank-and-file members haul a bill to the floor once 218 signatures pile up, bypassing a speaker who would rather it stayed buried in committee.
A bill six weeks in the making, not a last-minute add-on
Anyone assuming Monday's move came together overnight is missing the timeline. Massie's new measure, H.R. 9694, has carried the formal name Epstein Files Transparency Act II since he filed it on July 15, with Rep. Ro Khanna of California and Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez of New Mexico steering it through the House ever since. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Lujan lead a matching version in the Senate. Massie simply pulled the discharge trigger once six weeks went by with no floor vote scheduled, exactly as the bill's authors had warned they would do if Speaker Mike Johnson let it sit untouched.
Where the original law simply ordered files released, the follow-up is built around consequences for what its backers call noncompliance. It would hand survivors, state attorneys general and members of Congress the standing to sue the Justice Department for withholding, redacting or delaying Epstein-related material, widen their access to records the government has kept sealed, and expose any official who conceals or falsifies files the law requires them to hand over to criminal penalties.
A New Mexico Democrat with her own state's fight behind her
Leger Fernandez's role turns this from a pure Capitol Hill procedural story into something with real geographic stakes. She represents a mostly rural, heavily Hispanic and Native district across northern and eastern New Mexico, chairs the House Democratic Women's Caucus and once held a leadership post on the board of MALDEF, the country's leading Latino civil rights legal group.
Her involvement is tied to a concrete local fight, not just her biography. On August 12, she stood beside New Mexico's Democratic attorney general, Raul Torrez, inside his Albuquerque office to promote the follow-up bill, roughly a week after his office had sued the federal Justice Department over records connected to Epstein's Zorro Ranch property in Santa Fe County. Torrez told reporters at that event that the ranch turns up more than 13,000 times across the files the government has already released, with much of that material blacked out. "If transparency is not transparency, then justice is not justice," Leger Fernandez said at the same event. The fight gives Latino communities well beyond her own district, from South Florida to Texas to Illinois, an elected Latina lawmaker pushing the issue at both the state and federal level rather than watching it unfold from Washington.
Names on the floor, denials right behind them
Massie's Monday remarks went beyond procedure. On the House floor, he read out 14 names he described as Epstein "coconspirators," including the British royal now called Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and retail billionaire Les Wexner, both of whom have denied any wrongdoing. He also singled out Lesley Groff, Epstein's longtime executive assistant, accusing her of helping traffic women rather than simply working nearby. Groff has repeatedly told congressional investigators the opposite: in closed-door testimony this past June, she said she never knowingly booked appointments involving minors and had no idea Epstein was committing crimes. That denial hasn't held up well with the people it concerns most — several survivors told CNN this summer that Groff's account does not match what they lived through, and the panel overseeing the matter has since been gathering sworn statements from survivors to determine whether she misled Congress.
The Republican math Massie still needs to solve
Getting to 218 signatures remains the hardest part of the plan. Only three Republicans crossed party lines on the original petition — Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has since left Congress and cited her Epstein-files break with Trump as a factor in that decision. Massie, who describes the new push as trying to "capture lightning in a bottle twice," has said for months that he needs every Democrat plus three Republicans besides himself. As of September 4, he told a reporter that the arithmetic has held steady since the first go-round, except this time Mace signed on early alongside him, leaving him hunting for two more GOP votes rather than three. More than 100 lawmakers had added their names by that Friday, a sharp jump from the roughly three dozen signatures on file just days earlier, though the petition still sits well short of the threshold. Not everyone is convinced another round is necessary: fellow Kentucky Republican Andy Barr told a local outlet he already voted to release the files once and has little appetite for what he called grandstanding.
What the government says it already handed over
The Justice Department maintains it has done its part. Then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced on January 30 that the department had made public over 3 million pages of records, alongside 2,000-plus videos and close to 180,000 images, out of an estimated 6 million pages the government had gathered in total. A subsequent letter from House Judiciary Committee Democrats argued the release covered only about half of the material the department itself had flagged as potentially responsive, including more than 200,000 additional pages the letter said were redacted or withheld outright — a shortfall that lines up with Massie's own recurring claim that the government continues to sit on more than three million files. Blanche, since confirmed as attorney general in a 50-49 Senate vote this past August, has told lawmakers the department's review is finished and that no closed investigations remain. Neither side's tally has been independently reconciled.
Political stakes as Massie heads for the exits
This fight carries real personal weight for its author. Massie lost his own Kentucky primary this spring to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein in a contest that multiple campaign-finance trackers ranked as the costliest House primary the country has ever seen, meaning this could be one of his final major pushes before he leaves Congress altogether. He has also floated the possibility that Speaker Johnson could send lawmakers home ahead of the midterms specifically to dodge a vote, a claim Johnson's office has not addressed on the record. Massie says the calendar doesn't worry him: if the signatures aren't there by November, he expects a lame-duck session will produce them, and predicts a Democratic-controlled House would finish the job regardless.
For now, the petition remains open, needing roughly 110 more signatures to force Republican leadership's hand a second time.
