Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty Photographs
Home Speaker Mike Johnson’s transient misalignment with Donald Trump is over.
After supporting the complete launch of the Epstein information only a week in the past, the Louisiana Republican on Tuesday threw a wrench in these efforts within the Home and, in doing so, additional cemented his repute as certainly one of President Trump’s most loyal fixers.
At a press convention, Johnson introduced he was shutting the Home down early for summer time recess and canceling all flooring votes scheduled for Thursday — a transfer, he claimed, that was meant to keep away from “political video games” stemming from a bipartisan push to move a decision calling for the general public launch of information associated to financier and intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein. The measure sparked a frenzy on the Home flooring late Monday that ended with the GOP going to recess to dam a compelled vote.
However by Tuesday morning, Johnson insisted there was actually nothing to see right here other than a number of rogue Republican lawmakers who “chunk their very own colleagues” and Democrats attempting to capitalize on a perceived lack of transparency over the Trump administration’s dealing with of the Epstein case. Republicans, he stated, had been taking the excessive highway by successfully strolling away from the controversy.
Requested straight on Tuesday if anybody in Trump’s White Home had requested him to delay voting on the Epstein decision, Johnson provided a curious response.
“No,” he stated. “However as you all know, I converse to the president a number of occasions a day on a typical day. Typically. All the time.”
The Home Speaker’s shifting stance on the Epstein case has appeared to rely totally on Trump’s rants. In an interview on the top of MAGA outrage over the Epstein case final week, the in any other case Trump-loyal Republican got here out forcefully in favor of placing “all the pieces on the market” and letting the general public draw their very own conclusions. Lawyer Normal Pam Bondi, he stated on the time, ought to “clarify” why she’d initially appeared to substantiate the existence of an Epstein consumer listing solely to later deny it.
However his tune quickly modified after Trump gave a dressing all the way down to the GOP “weaklings” who had fallen for the Epstein “hoax.” Then Johnson appeared to get in full lockstep with Trump after The Wall Road Journal reported about a lewd birthday letter Trump purportedly despatched to Epstein a long time in the past, pulling Trump again into the scandal he’d sought to persuade his supporters was “nonsense.” (Trump denied writing the letter and has filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit over the report.)
Johnson insisted on Tuesday that he’d heard the “president’s coronary heart” and the 2 had been now on the identical web page in the case of the Epstein case — they each need “full transparency.” However “ethical duty” to guard Epstein’s victims should come first, Johnson stated, including somewhat cryptically that additionally, “you need to permit the laws to ripen.”
“We’re not going to play political video games with this,” he stated.
Across the identical time Johnson made these remarks, Trump demanded from the Oval Workplace that reporters “cease speaking about nonsense” and focus as a substitute on how his Justice Division ought to go after Barack Obama for “treason.” The Trump administration has renewed its assaults on the president’s political foes in latest days and re-upped its grievances with what Trump has dubbed the “Russia hoax,” with intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard urging the Justice Division to analyze Obama officers in a transfer broadly seen as a distraction from the Epstein controversy. Johnson acquired onboard with that on Monday, saying he wouldn’t hesitate to subpoena Obama to testify earlier than Congress. That, too, will apparently have to attend till September.
