Mike Johnson Pulls Plug on Congress Early to Avoid Voting on Epstein

Republicans are taking an early summer break as infighting intensifies over the Epstein scandal.

Caucus leadership is sending everyone home early, Politico reported Tuesday, canceling all votes from Thursday. The schedule change comes after the Rules Committee recessed Monday night when Democrats threatened to force a vote on the Epstein files.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters earlier Tuesday it was “unlikely” that the committee would reconvene, a decision that will stall any progress conservatives were hoping to make this week on several key agenda items, including an immigration bill.

South Carolina Representative Ralph Norman told ABC News Monday that several Republicans on the committee, including himself, did not want to vote on the Democrat-led effort to uncover more details pertaining to the Epstein case, deriding the vote as “grandstanding.”

It’s the second week in a row that the House has become completely paralyzed by debate over the potential release of records regarding the notorious child sex trafficker.

The botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague the Trump administration since the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.” A YouGov/Economist poll conducted last week found that the majority of Americans—67 percent, including 59 percent of self-identified Trump voters—believed that the administration is “covering up evidence relating to the Epstein case.”

But if Republicans want transparency, they have a funny way of showing it. Last week, conservative lawmakers unquestioningly fell in line to support Donald Trump’s narrative that there’s nothing to see here, blocking a Democratic-led effort to release the Epstein files. The final vote was 211 to 210—just one dissenting Republican would have tipped the scales.

Republicans are scheduled to meet behind closed doors Tuesday morning for their weekly conference meeting. Evacuating the lower chamber over a tough vote on the Epstein files also likely won’t play well with Trump, who is hosting a megabill celebration for Republican lawmakers at the White House Tuesday evening.

House Speaker Mike Johnson initially refuted the possibility of an early exit, telling Politico that “we’re not sending anybody home.”

But Johnson was proven wrong before Noon. House GOP leadership announced that “votes are no longer expected in the House on Thursday,” with last votes taking place on Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. ET, ending the schedule a day early.

This story has been updated.

Late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart cursed out Donald Trump and CBS News Monday night following last week’s announcement that the Late Show With Stephen Colbert had been canceled. 

During his show, Colbert took a moment to respond to Trump celebrating the news that the Late Show was ending. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social last week. 

“How dare you, sir,” Colbert said. “Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism? Go fuck yourself.”

During Colbert’s show Monday, several other late-night hosts appeared in the audience to lend their support. While Weird Al Yankovic and Lin Manuel Miranda sang Viva la Vida by Coldplay, the camera scanned the audience, landing on Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen, then Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, before jumping to Jon Stewart and John Oliver. 

Finally, the camera rested on an animated Trump spooning the Paramount logo, a reference to the viral kiss cam video from a recent Coldplay concert that led to the resignation of a data company CEO. As the spotlight shone on them, the animated Trump ducked down and crawled away. 

There had been some speculation that Colbert’s ousting was the result of  his accusing Paramount of paying a “big fat bribe” to Trump in the form of a $16 million settlement over the editing of Kamala Harris’s interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes last fall. Colbert claimed that CBS had acknowledged the lawsuit was “completely without merit” but agreed to pay a large sum to ease its sale to Skydance Media—a deal that needs approval from the president.

Prior to Colbert’s show, Stewart slammed CBS for its cowardice in the face of the Trump administration during Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Comedy Central is also owned by Paramount. 

“The fact that CBS didn’t try to save their number one rated network late-night franchise that’s been on the air for over three decades is part of what’s making everyone wonder, ‘What’s this? Purely financial? Or maybe the path of least resistance for your $8 billion merger?’” Stewart said. 

Stewart argued that the Late Show wasn’t ending for financial reasons, or even because Trump had directly threatened it. “I think the answer is in the fear and pre-compliance that is gripping all of America’s institutions at this very moment,” he said. 

Stewart argued that it was the very shows CBS sought to censor that had provided the value of Paramount’s $8 billion deal. “Shows that say something, shows that take a stand, shows that are unafraid—this is not a ‘We speak truth to power.’ We don’t,” Stewart said. “We speak opinions to television cameras. But we try. We fucking try, every night.”

“And if you believe, as corporations or as networks, you can make yourself so innocuous, that you can serve a gruel so flavorless that you will never again be on the boy king’s radar, (a) why will anyone watch you? And you are fucking wrong,” he said. 

Stewart also pointed out that straying away from criticizing Trump would do little to protect the channel from catching the president’s ire—considering Trump had just recently filed a lawsuit against his old ally Rupert Murdoch, who’d helped to transform Fox News into a Trump propaganda machine. 

Stewart concluded by urging institutions to “sack the fuck up” or “go fuck yourself.”

After nearly three weeks of uproar over his administration’s closing of the Jeffrey Epstein files, President Trump has instead opted to release FBI records on African American civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The public will gain access to more than 240,000 pages of records that were under a court-ordered seal in the National Archives since 1977.

Dr. King’s immediate family, including his children Bernie and Martin III, have been in open opposition to the Trump administration’s decision for some time now.

“We recognize that the release of documents concerning the assassination of our father, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has long been a subject of interest, captivating public curiosity for decades. As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief—a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met—an absence our family has endured for over 57 years,” they said in a statement posted on X. “We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief.”

It’s unclear what these records will show us, other than more personal and private information about Dr. King’s life—which would be further confirmation of the U.S. government’s incessant, malicious, and unconstitutional surveillance of Dr. King via J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operation.

“During our father’s lifetime, he was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The intent of the government’s COINTELPRO campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement,” the King siblings wrote in the same statement. “These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth—undermining the dignity and freedoms of private citizens who fought for justice, designed to neutralize those who dared to challenge the status quo.”

Much of the “conspiracy” surrounding King’s assassination has already been parsed through, as the siblings noted.

“In 1999, our family filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit in Shelby County, Tennessee. The jury unanimously concluded that our father was the victim of a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators, including government agencies as a part of a wider scheme. The verdict also affirmed that someone other than James Earl Ray was the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame. Our family views that verdict as an affirmation of our long-held beliefs. As we review these newly released files, we will assess whether they offer additional insights beyond the findings our family has already accepted.”

More than anything, Trump is using Dr. King’s name recognition and the lasting trauma surrounding his legacy as a mere distraction from his own mess, as his base continues to come to terms with the major, yearslong promise he broke by abandoning the Epstein files.

In retaliation for reporting on Donald Trump’s relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, the White House is ousting The Wall Street Journal from the press pool for the president’s upcoming trip to Scotland.

Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement Monday that no publication is “guaranteed special access to cover President Trump in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and in his private workspaces,” according to Politico. “Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board. Every news organization in the entire world wishes to cover President Trump, and the White House has taken significant steps to include as many voices as possible.”

Leavitt is, of course, referring to the Journal’s recent bombshell report that, in 2003, Trump sent a lewd 50th birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump denies the veracity of the letter and is meritlessly suing the paper over its report—further stoking the ongoing firestorm over the administration’s perceived lack of transparency surrounding the case of the late financier and sex criminal.

Politico reports that the White House declined to comment on whether the Journal’s removal from the press pool would be permanent. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time Trump punished a publication by restricting its ability to cover his administration. After all, his ban on the Associated Press for failing to change its style guide to ratify his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” remains in effect.

Be it in retaliating against publications deemed insufficiently friendly, seizing control of the press pool from the White House Correspondents’ Association, or altering the makeup of the press room such that administration officials receive more questions from unctuous right-wing media groups, Trump’s White House appears as hell-bent as ever on defanging the press of its ability to function as a watchdog of the government.

Donald Trump is letting his underlings take the fall for the administration’s seismic Epstein scandal.

Facing enormous pressure from his base last week, Trump ordered the Justice Department to release additional documents pertaining to its investigation into Epstein. The White House did not specify at the time if the documents would be made public, and did not explain the sudden contradiction after Trump had spent the better part of the last week insisting that the Epstein fiasco was a Democrat-invented “hoax.”

But by Monday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was deflecting questions to the subordinate agencies for updates on the case.

“Why doesn’t the president just order the FBI to release the full Epstein files and just get it all out there?” a reporter asked Leavitt in a gaggle outside the White House.

“The president has said if the Department of Justice and the FBI want to move forward with releasing any credible evidence, they should do so. As to why they have not, you should ask the FBI about that,” Leavitt said, directing journalists to FBI Director Kash Patel.

Trump is, apparently, happy to let his Justice Department chief, Attorney General Pam Bondi, take the blame, suddenly reversing course on his fervent defense of Bondi in the weeks since her own agency issued a memo contradicting her on the existence of the pedophilic sex trafficker’s so-called “client list.”

“One thing that’s been clear is his feelings about it,” an unnamed White House official told NBC News last week. “This now resides within the DOJ.”

But Trump has a well-documented history with the New York financier. Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times; Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday; and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

And more details are emerging: Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin challenged the administration last week regarding its “chaotic” review of tens of thousands of documents related to the Epstein investigation, accusing Bondi of pressuring FBI staff to flag and then cover up mentions of Trump in the records.