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House Votes on Releasing Epstein Files; House Votes 427-1 to Release Epstein Files. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired November 18, 2025 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[14:30:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Pizzagate, QAnon, it's an obsession. And that explains why the president wasn't able to get people just to move on.

Can you talk about -- this is something that has been sort of years in the making, this support that the president was not able to overcome.

WILL SOMMER, REPORTER, FALSE FLAG NEWSLETTER: That's why this is such a resonant issue. I mean, for so many years, Trump supporters have latched onto conspiracy theories that are based around child sex trafficking. Now, in the Epstein case, this is a very real issue.

On the other hand, it's also been the basis for a lot of conspiracy theories like QAnon, very similar to Pizzagate. There are religious elements for a lot of Trump supporters. They see themselves as rescuing children from almost satanic figures. They see themselves as soldiers for God.

And so in that way, that's, I think, a lot of the emotional aspect that Trump has not been able to overcome here.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: I should note, just moments ago, Congressman Ronnie Jackson of Texas is the -- has casted the lone nay vote.

KEILAR: Oh, it disappeared.

SANCHEZ: And literally, just as a moment ago, it changed.

KEILAR: To shed a little light onto this, as a former congressional correspondent, sometimes they fill in the wrong bubble. It's actually a button, right? I think it's a button.

They put in a card. This will happen from time to time. And I can't tell you probably how much Ronnie Jackson was panicking as he was rectifying that to get it out of the nay column there.

He did not mean to do that.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: I'm not surprised that happened. If there would be a Republican to oppose this, I mean, he may be in that category. He's very close to the president personally.

KEILAR: Keep an eye in it.

SANCHEZ: He fits the bill, having been President Trump's former personal doctor during his first administration.

ZELENY: Very close to him. Still travels with him significantly.

SANCHEZ: Yes. Sarah, I wonder, because as we're watching this unfold, we're getting some reporting from inside the room from CNN's MJ Lee that a few dozen Epstein survivors, their lawyers and family members, are watching from the House gallery as the vote takes place inside the chamber. Despite the fact that there are still potentially many hurdles ahead, this represents a victory for these survivors and their families.

SARAH FITZPATRICK, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER: It's a huge victory. It's also a huge victory for the democratic process. I mean, this is an example of individuals without any power banding together and insisting, insisting that information should be shared that is irrelevant to the public.

And so I think this is absolutely a victory for them, and there haven't been very many of those. So much of, I think, anyone involved in this story, whether you were a victim, whether you're a member of law enforcement that toiled away on this case for years and years and had the case squashed. There has been so much kind of missed opportunity in almost moments that I think many of these survivors, law enforcement, others who work in this space, journalists like me, is it really going to happen? I think, you know, we've all gotten our hopes up so many times, but this time is different. And it speaks to what we've all been talking about right now, which is that Republicans are defying the president.

They're openly defying the president. And that is a change in the scenario that I think makes it explosive.

KEILAR: The vote is still open, but it has surpassed that 290 vote threshold that Manu was talking about. So Sarah, what happens from here? I mean, what's going to be the outcome?

This is a victory. It symbolizes a victory, but in very real terms, what will releasing all of these documents mean?

FITZPATRICK: So I think the key point is we do not know exactly what the quote unquote Epstein files are. There is a huge amount of material that was collected during various jurisdictions, Florida, New Mexico, New York. There are files that the Justice Department would have created themselves when they've done this review.

One of the things I think will be so interesting to know is has the Trump Justice Department done any new investigative steps in these six months that they claim to have been turning over every rock and using hundreds of FBI agents that could have been doing national security work or even child sex trafficking work to focus on this issue? Is there new things there or has this just been all kind of smoke and mirrors?

KEILAR: Have they been talking to people you talk to?

FITZPATRICK: So this is a really interesting point. I have spoken to at this point over a thousand people in some way connected with this story and very few of them have ever been contacted by law enforcement. And of those who have been contacted recently, it's almost zero.

So exactly what all these investigative resources have been spent on I think is a really important question, not just for the public, but for Congress.

SANCHEZ: That is stunning. We should note, you may see on your screen, there is a single nay vote from one of the House Democrats. It is very possible that as we saw just a moment ago with Congressman Ronny Jackson, they voted nay in error.

This was expected to get broad support from Democrats. So it certainly would be surprising to see a nay vote. However, we'll keep our eyes on the screen and see whether that Congressperson changes their vote.

[14:35:00]

Will, back to something that you were describing a moment ago and it made me think of what we heard from President Trump yesterday in the Oval Office. The suggestion, and as Sarah says, that we may not know what the Epstein files actually contain in terms of what range of information they might have, how much information and how extensive it is.

When the President says, similar to other conspiracies that the administration has sought to release documents on, whether the Kennedy assassination, the MLK Jr. assassination, is there a point where you think we'll get down to the bottom of what occurred surrounding Jeffrey Epstein that will satisfy the public?

SOMMER: I think that's going to be very difficult to ever satisfy people, particularly given how the administration has handled this. I mean, over and over, they've obstructed the investigation, they've gotten in the way. And, you know, Dick Durbin, the Senator, has claimed he heard from within the FBI that documents mentioning Trump's name were flagged.

We know when Pam Bondi and Cash Patel have gone in front of Congress and they've been asked, well, what happened to those documents when they contained Trump's name? They won't answer, and they stonewall. And that, I think, raises a lot of questions for people about whether, if ever, we'll really get to the bottom of what's in these files.

KEILAR: Note that nay vote wasn't oopsie. It has been rectified and has now been changed to a yay vote.

What, Jeff, does the President, does the White House see this as a distraction from?

ZELENY: Well, the list is growing a bit longer, but I would have to put affordability and economic concerns kind of on the list. You could also argue that, you know, it is occupying time that otherwise may be directed at issues that are of also concern to Americans, and perhaps, in some respects, more concern to some Americans.

But I think that, by and large, what I'm most struck by today is, and I think that we really just have to pull back the lens and look at this, we have not seen this moment in the Donald Trump era in the last decade, really, that House Republicans, as Sarah was saying earlier, sort of, you know, this unorganized group came together and a small group sort of formed this power and almost like a snowball, it just moved forward and moved forward and moved forward in ways that we could not have predicted. With Marjorie Taylor Greene playing a key role, Lauren Boebert playing a key role, two of the biggest supporters of the President. Speaker Johnson did his level best, four months, to block what is happening from happening, and he ended up voting for it. So that just shows you how the politics of this changed.

But I think what this means for the President overall, this is the beginning of cracks in the armor. There's no doubt about it. I'm not suggesting it's going to appear in many other things, but I think on foreign policy, that is one other thing we are going to see significant divides inside the Republican Party among supporters of the President.

So that's what this kind of opens the door to, but it is an extraordinary moment, and now we will see how the Senate responds to this. Senate Majority Leader John Thune also is not planning for this moment, so they are going to be huddling. My guess is they want to get the hot potato out of the Senate as soon as possible and off their plate, but we shall see.

SANCHEZ: And we've just seen support for the full release of the Epstein files via this discharge petition. Eclipse 400, yay votes. A single nay Republican vote, though we've seen a couple of oopsies today.

This apparently coming from Congressman Clay Higgins. We'll see whether that perhaps was a mistake or whether he may be one of the only nay votes we'll see on this petition.

I want to go to the White House now and Kaitlan Collins, because Kaitlan, in just moments, we're anticipating that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, is going to be leaving after his lunch and visit with President Trump.

It's unlikely that President Trump has been watching this vote because of that, but I would imagine that after MBS leaves, the President would at least be informed of what happened on the House floor. And as Jeff describes, these sort of cracks in the armor and these divides within the President's base, do you think he senses that that is what this vote signifies?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR AND CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I mean, obviously the White House feels that pressure because they were unable to convince a House Republican to change her vote. That's pretty unheard of to have the President have his team, his attorney general and his FBI director personally bring in a House member to the Situation Room, unless they're the chairman of a committee or something. That just does not happen very often here at the White House.

So to go to that great of lengths and including a phone call from the President to Lauren Boebert here in this case, that is an extraordinary amount of effort that the White House put in to stop this moment from happening that did not come to fruition. And this is not a day that they expected to see when Thomas Massey was driving a lot of this with Ro Khanna, you know, driving this discharge petition as they've been doing since back in July. I mean, if you look at the petition itself, the first signatures were put on there in July.

[14:40:00]

The last one was put on when Adelida Grijalva was sworn in in November. It just speaks to how long this has been going on. And the way that this has changed from July to November has even caught the White House by surprise. And so I think you've seen that.

As Jeff noted, it is an incredibly rare moment to see where the President is being defied by his own party in this manner and causing him instead to switch his position on a vote. It is normally the other way around here since Trump took office the first term as well as the second term. And so we are watching right now as the Saudi Crown Prince is expected to leave here.

He's about 40 minutes later than he was actually scheduled to be here. And he'll be returning later for a dinner that we'll be watching closely as well, just in terms of the magnitude of that visit being the first time that the Saudi Crown Prince has been here at the White House since U.S. intelligence agencies determined that he personally ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi as of course he was confronted with inside the Oval Office earlier when President Trump intervened in that remarkable moment, not only justifying Khashoggi's killing, but also arguing the MBS had nothing to do with it despite what Trump's own CIA back in 2018 said. That's in and of itself a huge headline coming out of the White House here today.

But the President as well was downplaying any ties that he has to Jeffrey Epstein and instead putting the focus back on Democrats inside the Oval Office earlier, something that he's ordered his Attorney General to investigate. But I do think it's safe to say when we look at this vote, when we look at what's happened with how much the Jeffrey Epstein story has loomed over this first year of Donald Trump's presidency, that speaks in and of itself as something that caught the White House off guard and something that kind of got out of their control to a degree in terms of what was happening on Capitol Hill.

And Boris and Brianna, I'll tell you this, I was talking to Thomas Massie last week and after they got those 218 votes and he said that he had spoken to one of the holdouts, one of those Republicans, he would not say which one, and they had told him that a White House official said they did not want to give Thomas Massie a win.

I think a big part of that is also an animating factor here for the White House is that Trump despises the Kentucky congressman so much that he did not want him to have a victory here in terms of getting these out. But we were listening to that press conference earlier and there was a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse who said she voted for Donald Trump and she had a message for the president where she was saying this wasn't about him, that she wanted him to kind of get out of the way and not make this political, that it is the survivors themselves who want these files to come out here.

KEILAR: Yes, and that Kentucky congressman chose a winning horse in this issue for sure, Kaitlan.

Will, these lawmakers, these Republicans, you know, Trump can make life very difficult for them if they don't do what he wants, but they have an election coming up very soon. They're entering that election atmosphere very, very soon.

And you can imagine the ad if they voted against this, right?

SOMMER: Yes, I mean, the midterms are less than a year away at this point. I mean, this is something Thomas Massey has been very aware of. He's said, look, maybe Trump can protect you next time, maybe the election after that, but by 2030, he's going to be gone and you're going to have to answer to voters and people who are running against you.

So I mean, look, this is something voters seem to care a lot about, really in Republican primaries as well as general elections. And I think this is crazy that there's a unanimous vote. I mean, I think a lot of these Republicans --

KEILAR: Well --

SOMMER: -- well, almost unanimous perhaps, but a lot of them have seen, you know, I don't want to be answering for years why I voted against. But truly, who knows what documents might eventually come out.

SANCHEZ: Yes, let's go to Manu Raju on Capitol Hill. Manu, we'd seen a pair of nay votes that eventually went into the yay column. This nay vote from Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana, sticking around a bit longer than those did when they were corrected.

Had we heard from Congressman Higgins? There's a lot of lawmakers to keep track of, obviously, especially on the House side. Had he been outspoken about wanting to support this despite the president's blessing to vote for it?

MANY RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Boris, he had actually been opposed to this for some time. In fact, I asked him just last week about whether he's actually going to support this bill. And he told me, no, he is not going to support this plan because he said that it would --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The bill is passed, and without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table. KEILAR: And there you have it. That is the outcome and some cheers there coming from the floor of the House of Representatives. Let's go back to Manu Raju, who is there outside of the Capitol.

A successful vote here with, again, one nay vote. It appeared at the end, is that right?

SANCHEZ: Yes.

KEILAR: One nay vote at the end, but otherwise, everyone, they're voting for it -- Manu.

[14:45:00]

RAJU: Yes, gavel down, the final vote, 427 to one. A stunning and overwhelming vote after a furious battle that has been really taking place for years, but it has intensified over the last several months and overcoming the opposition of the Speaker of the House, the President of the United States, ultimately forcing them to capitulate inside with the proponents of this measure. Pushing it over the House, now sending it over to the Senate and putting it on the lap of the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, who has yet to indicate how he will take up this bill that will call for the release of all of the Epstein files.

Now, we do have that one dissenting vote. That is Congressman Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana. I asked him just last week if he planned to vote for this bill.

He said he was a no, and he said he was concerned that it would interfere with the ongoing Oversight Committee investigation into all of this. They have released a number of documents. Those documents, though, are mostly from the Epstein estate that they've gotten so far.

This bill could involve a number of other documents, including that are in the possession of the Justice Department, which is why the proponents are pushing this. But Clay Higgins does not believe there's any need for this bill at all. In fact, we just have a statement from Clay Higgins as well.

He said he has been a principled no on this bill from this beginning. He said what was wrong with the bill three months ago is still wrong today. He goes on to detail why he believes it is in a lengthy statement. He said, if enacted in its current form, this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files released to a rabid media will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt.

So he is the lone no vote on this, but make no mistake, this is a huge victory for the people who have been pushing this for years. Not just the victims who've been on Capitol Hill multiple times lobbying members, but the Republicans and Democrats who have banded together to push this through. The three lead sponsors of this bill, Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican, and Thomas Massey, another Republican.

People who are rank and file members forcing their leadership into action here, a really, really remarkable and stunning outcome and now it's up to the Senate to decide what to do and then the White House, will it comply with these demands and ultimately release these files?

SANCHEZ: A remarkable moment given the saga that this discharge petition has faced, including opposition from President Trump himself. A 427 to one vote in favor of releasing the full Epstein files. Manu Raju on Capitol Hill, we're going to take a quick break.

Stay with CNN, we'll be right back.

[14:50:00]

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KEILAR: All right. We are tracking this House vote. They just voted to release the Epstein files, and it was almost entirely unified. There was one no vote, 427 to 1.

So that is going to proceed in an extraordinary day there on The Hill, something that you would not have imagined even a few weeks ago after the president sort of flipped around and said the Republicans should support it.

SANCHEZ: Yes, no doubt. We're back with our panel now. And Jeff, I wonder, as you noted a moment ago, if you're Senator John Thune and you're sitting there, this was not something you expected to pass and wind up on your desk.

ZELENY: It was not. I mean, even as recently as just over the Sunday show's last weekend, Senator Abbas, who's in the leadership, basically said the Senate is not going to take this up. Well, this vote now, effectively unanimous with the exception of one vote, is going to make its way to the Senate, and the Senate will have a choice to make.

I mean, can you imagine the blowback if they would decide to hold this up? Why do they want to do that? I mean, this is not -- there's no upside for them.

So I do believe it will move through the Senate quickly, we shall see. And again, I think the bigger question here is, politically speaking, the cracks are in the armor of President Trump, as in any second term. I think we should be careful by saying it's not cracked, but we can see a few cracks.

But I think in a bigger point, what will ultimately happen by this? Will the DOJ files actually be released, or will there be some other loophole? To Sarah's point, there's always been something.

Will there be something else that stands in the way of this?

KEILAR: And then, as you would expect, that it would pass the Senate, and it goes to the President, Will, then he has the choice of what kind of optics around the signing of this bill. Does he just get it done behind closed doors, maybe find a reason to do that on a weekend, make it expeditious, perhaps the Senate can help him out with that timing, or does he sort of make a show of it? SOMMER: I mean, this is a hot potato, and, you know, the Senate obviously wants to get it out of their hands pretty quickly. And so then it goes to Trump. And ultimately, is he going to decide to sign it or not?

One imagines, on one hand, maybe he would want to get rid of it pretty quickly. On the other, he's a guy who likes spectacle. And I think we're seeing the administration say, you know, why don't we pretend that we're in favor of this the whole time, and say, maybe we invite the survivors to the White House, do a whole signing of it.

And, you know, those are going to be some of the challenges facing the administration as this comes up.

SANCHEZ: Sarah, given what we've heard from many of the survivors, do you think they would accept that potential invitation?

FITZPATRICK: I think they have always generally been of the kind of broad belief that this is not a political issue. This is a transparency issue. This is a law enforcement issue.

This is about crimes against children and young women. However, I do think that any idea, well, yes, the president does like a spectacle. He also doesn't like tough questions.

[14:55:00]

And we now have many, many, many documents in black and white of Donald Trump seeming to have knowledge about ongoing, if not crimes, like very questionable behavior. And so if you get a bunch of survivors in that room in the Oval Office, these are women, they are not afraid.

They have been through the worst. They are going to ask him to his face. And I think the key point is he does not have a good answer for that, that he has shared with us thus far.

KEILAR: Let's walk through that. He has said that he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago because he was stealing girls or women from the spa and that one of those women was Virginia Giuffre. The e-mail that came out from the Epstein estate last week talks about how he had asked Ghislaine to knock it off, right?

So there being some knowledge at that time, which predates the plea deal, right? Because the year, this would have been a few years before the plea, the first plea deal, the sweetheart plea deal that he gets in Florida. So it is interesting that you say that.

Because from the perspective of some of these women, I mean, how do they feel about the idea that someone may know that Jeffrey Epstein is a creep and maybe took care of getting him to leave women alone at Mar-a-Lago, but otherwise did not do anything?

FITZPATRICK: I published a piece in July that said Virginia Giuffre's family wants to know what the president knows. And I have e-mailed the White House consistently ever since that piece about, OK, if he had knowledge that there was something going on, in fact, he shared on Air Force One when that kind of blurted out that comment, seemingly out of the blue, he said, oh, and he did it again a second time. So there is a potential victim that has perhaps never been identified that the president has knowledge of.

And we have not yet seen any investigative action towards that. And we have not seen any answers from that. And I think the key point here as we're looking at this vote today is that Republicans in Congress, they have not been able to get those answers behind the scenes.

And the fact that they don't -- they're not receiving those answers, I think, and then on top of that, have been pressured, this real pressure campaign. I think we saw that backfire. And I think there are going to be huge ramifications from that.

SANCHEZ: Will, we have about a minute left. Last word to you.

SOMMER: I mean, I'm also wondering what's up with Ghislaine Maxwell, right?

I mean, there we see in these e-mails that Epstein and Ghislaine appeared to believe they had some kind of leverage on Trump. Maybe that's true. Maybe it's not.

But she sort of inexplicably was moved to this minimum security prison. And I think we're going to start getting more answers if Democrats take back one of the houses of Congress in the midterms. And every day the administration tries to push this back, gets them closer to that election where the situation could get even worse for the president.

KEILAR: And yes, it's a very good question. And we should just note she was moved to this sort of more of a prison camp. She's been having certain privileges, as a whistleblower has told The Hill, where it comes to meals, unlimited toilet paper, which I know we maybe chuckle at, but that's actually a very big deal, certainly in prison.

So we're going to see where this all goes.

Thank you so much to our panel. Really appreciate it. A new hour of CNN NEWS CENTRAL starts after a quick break.

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