Adelita Grijalva will be sworn in on Wednesday by Speaker Mike Johnson, his office said on Tuesday, ending weeks of delays and likely triggering a vote in the House of Representatives around the release of the Department of Justice’s trove of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
The speaker’s office made the announcement Tuesday afternoon, as Congress appeared to be on the brink of ending the longest federal government shutdown in history. Johnson previously said that Grijalva’s swearing-in would be delayed until the shutdown ended.
Democrats in the chamber have loudly insisted for weeks that Johnson’s real aim in delaying Grijalva’s swearing-in was to prevent a vote on a resolution co-sponsored by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Ro Khanna (D-California) which, with Grijalva’s signature, will be forced to the House floor as privileged legislation. With the votes of every Democrat in the chamber and several Republicans, it’s expected to pass in an embarrassing defeat for the Trump administration.
Grijalva won a special election for the seat vacated by the passing of her father, former Rep. Raúl Grijalva, in September. Her father died in March, during his 12th term in Congress.
Khanna and Massie struck an alliance on the Epstein files after the Trump administration went back on its word to release more information pertaining to the investigation of Epstein earlier this year. Convicted of sex offences, Epstein was a pedophile and sex trafficker who enjoyed connections with many powerful and high-profile men and women during his life, including Britain’s former Prince, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, and U.S. political figures like Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.
The pair are due to hold a press conference on the issue Wednesday, as Grijalva is sworn in.
open image in galleryIn the spring of 2025, Trump and his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, summoned right-wing influencers such as Jack Posobiec to the White House to receive binders labeled “phase one” of the Department of Justice’s Epstein document dump. Further releases did not come to pass, and the DoJ eventually released a joint statement with the FBI walking back many previous positions: the agencies now claimed that a “list” of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators never existed, and said that future releases of information would harm victims of sex abuse.
Trump, his vice president J.D. Vance, and numerous other members of the administration endorsed calls to release the files before they came into power in January. In the aftermath of the joint DoJ-FBI statement, those calls evolved into criticism of Trump’s MAGA voter base for not dropping the issue.
Bondi and her top deputy, FBI Director Kash Patel, have reportedly clashed in private over Bondi’s handling of the situation. It was the attorney general, in a Fox interview, who claimed (after that initial “phase one” event at the White House) that a folder pertaining to the Epstein investigation and the supposed client list was “on her desk”.
In the weeks since, the House of Representatives has taken up the ball with Republicans and Democrats alike vowing to push for more information from the investigation to be released. Largely, that effort has been headed up by the bipartisan House Oversight Committee, currently chaired by Republican Rep. James Comer. The Wall Street Journal also published a birthday note and sketch allegedly penned by Trump to Epstein, in which the author alludes to a “secret” the two men share.
Democrats, including some on the committee, have directly accused Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress, including Mike Johnson, of participating in a cover up to shield the president. It was reported by Bloomberg that FBI officials went through the files to redact mentions of the president’s name before the decision was eventually made to halt the releases altogether.
open image in galleryComer’s committee released some files related to the investigation in September, including the birthday book containing the note supposedly written by Trump.
The book contained notes from others in Epstein’s orbit, including former President Bill Clinton and the U.K.’s former ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson. The row over the revelations about Mandelson led to his ouster by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, while Clinton has not denied the authenticity of the note bearing his signature.
Trump and others including the former prince have denied committing any illegal activities with Epstein, who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 during Trump’s first term.
The manner of the sex trafficker’s death in a Manhattan detention facility notorious for its poor conditions and sloppy oversight remains a huge controversy. Many skeptics question whether Epstein’s death, ruled a suicide, was staged and in the wake of his death two prison guards admitted to falsifying records on the night of the incident. The Justice Department, in 2025, released security camera footage of the area outside of Epstein’s cell on the night of his death, but the video showed signs of editing and initially contained a minute of missing footage, fueling conspiracies.
