Hours after the House overwhelmingly passed a bill to force the release of files from the Justice Department’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the Senate moved to approve the legislation by unanimous consent — sending the measure to President Donald Trump’s desk and bringing the yearslong campaign to release some of America’s most scrutinized documents to its final stage.
Speaking on the Senate floor shortly after 5 p.m., Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., pushed through the Epstein Files Transparency Act using unanimous consent, a maneuver that allows the chamber to bypass normal procedural hurdles.
“Donald Trump has tried to cover up for Jeffrey Epstein long enough,” Schumer said on the Senate floor before asking to pass the bill. “It’s time that the Senate finished the job to finally compel the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files.”
The move was so swift that the Senate hadn’t even formally received the bill from the House. Schumer asked that once it arrives, it be automatically “deemed as passed” — an unusual step underscoring the urgency and political momentum behind this issue.
The sudden move to pass the bill in the Senate caps off a chaotic legislative process where Republicans spent months trying to deny Democrats a vote on the bill. In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was forced to give the legislation a vote only after four Republicans joined all Democrats on a discharge petition.
But once Democrats crossed the magic threshold and secured a vote, Republicans suddenly shifted. They lined up behind the legislation they had spent months trying to block — and Trump, facing the prospect of dozens of Republicans rebuking him on the House floor, endorsed the bill over the weekend in a dramatic reversal that effectively guaranteed House passage and functionally made it impossible for the Senate to ignore the measure.
The quick passage — without amendments — is sure to anger Johnson and many House Republicans. The speaker said he was only supporting the House bill with the expectation that it would be amended in the Senate, citing concerns that the legislation didn’t adequately protect victims from disclosures and would potentially release child sex abuse information.
(The legislation explicitly gives the Attorney General the discretion to redact that sort of information.)
Following the near-unanimous House vote, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., signaled that his chamber might move quickly, without changing the bill.
“I’m not sure there’s going to be a need for or desire for an amendment process over here,” Thune said.
But Johnson bristled at Thune’s remarks, saying he would “insist” on changes to the bill.
“I just saw that,” Johnson said of Thune’s comments on Tuesday. “Look, I talked to John Thune over the weekend. I just texted him. We’re gonna get together and we’ll talk about this. Hold on.”
Johnson added that there was “an easy way to amend the legislation” to make sure Congress was acting responsibly and not doing “permanent damage to the Justice system.”
The Senate didn’t hold on.
The majority leader took the step of “hotlining” the legislation — a process where each Senate office is contacted to see if a lawmaker has an objection to the bill — and without any senator immediately speaking up, Schumer went to the floor and tried to push the legislation through on the spot.
“This isn’t about Democrats versus Republicans or about Congress versus the president. This is about giving the American people the transparency they’ve been crying for,” Schumer said Tuesday night. “This is about holding accountable all the people in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle who raped, groomed, targeted and enabled the abuse of hundreds of girls for years and years. The American people have waited long enough.”
Once the legislation actually arrives in the Senate, it will take another trip to the president’s desk. And after coming out in support of the bill, it will be difficult for Trump not to sign, particularly after the House passed the measure 427-1 and the Senate passed it with unanimous consent.
There will be some opportunities for the Trump administration to hold back information in the files, however. With the Attorney General having broad authority to hold back information that could imperil future investigations — and with the Justice Department just opening investigations into some Democrats mentioned in the Epstein files — the public may not get the full look that lawmakers intended.
But that could also fuel more conspiracy theories that are currently tearing the MAGA movement apart. The Epstein files have already proven to be one of the few issues that normally devoted Republicans will break from the president on. And if the public has suspicions that they’re not getting the full picture, as mandated by the soon-to-be law, it could backfire on Trump.
Kevin Frey is a congressional reporter for MS NOW.
Syedah Asghar
Syedah Asghar covers Congress for MSNBC.