Hours before the House of Representatives’ scheduled vote on Tuesday over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, one of President Donald Trump’s most well-known evangelical allies published an op-ed that cautioned his administration against making the mistake Richard Nixon did, warning about the political consequences of a cover-up.
Trump has spent months discouraging Republicans from pushing for the release of the Epstein files, but amid reports that many House Republicans were planning to defy him and vote to release the files, he changed course over the weekend and said on Monday he’d sign the bill.
But even that support, as my colleague Steve Benen explained, comes with some fine print. Trump still has tools at his disposal to prevent the files’ full release. On Monday’s episode of “The Weeknight,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., noted concerns about legalistic efforts by the administration to prevent the release of some portion of the files.
But a prominent voice in MAGA world is trying to dissuade Trump from taking that path.
In an op-ed for the Christian Post titled “The Epstein file storm that won’t blow over,” Tony Perkins, president of the archconservative Family Research Council, says the Trump administration erred when it “reversed course” on the president’s campaign vow to release the files pertaining to his former friend and partygoer.
Perkins refers to the administration’s reported pressure campaign to persuade some Republicans to remove their names from the discharge petition. And he cites a conversation he had with Rep. Greg Steube of Florida, who reportedly said, “I don’t think this issue is going away.” Steube was correct: The issue lingered not only through a House recess, but also a weekslong government shutdown.
Perkins wrote that “the only way to prevent this political storm from becoming a political disaster is transparency,” before issuing a warning that invoked comparisons to Nixon:
We would do well to remember Watergate. It wasn’t the break-in that brought down a presidency — it was the cover-up. That scandal shattered confidence in the Oval Office for a generation and diminished America. The lesson remains painfully relevant today: when leaders hide the truth, the people lose faith — not just in them, but in the very institutions they represent.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.