Adelita Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who won a special election to fill her late father’s vacant congressional seat, was finally sworn in on Wednesday, 50 days after her victory, due to a delay by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana).
On the day of her swearing-in, Grijalva became the 218th lawmaker to sign a discharge petition that will force a vote in the House of Representatives on the release of thousands of pages of Department of Justice (DOJ) files on sex offender and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Johnson had claimed he was delaying swearing in Grijalva because the House was out of session, a decision he made due to the government shutdown. He insisted that refusing to seat Grijalva was consistent with precedent set by former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California), who also refused to seat people in the House when the chamber was out of session. However, earlier this year, Johnson subverted that precedent when he allowed Republicans to be sworn in when the House was out of session.
“The only thing that’s different about me and the three other people that this speaker swore in in under 24 hours from the date of their elections is I’m the 218th signer” of the discharge petition, Grijalva said last month.
After a swearing-in ceremony, Grijalva entered the House chamber to applause from Democrats. In her first remarks on the floor, she blasted Republicans for failing to address President Donald Trump’s many abuses of power.
“Basic freedoms are under attack. Health care premiums are skyrocketing. Babies are being ripped away from their parents by ICE agents. We can and must do better,” she said in her speech. “What is most concerning is not what this administration has done, but what the majority of this body has failed to do — hold Trump accountable.”
Grijalva immediately signed the discharge petition. Johnson has indicated that a vote on the bill to release the Epstein files will come next week.
The bill still faces steep odds of passage. In the Senate, it can be blocked by a filibuster. And Trump himself could veto the measure if it ever reaches his desk.
But a vote against the bill would be incredibly unpopular, as most Americans want the Epstein files to be made public. A veto would also be problematic for Trump, who was once good friends with Epstein.
On the day Grijalva was sworn in, newly released emails from Epstein revealed that Trump “knew about the girls” involved in Epstein’s sex crimes. The disgraced financier also described Trump as the “dog that hasn’t barked,” leading some commentators to speculate that Trump kept Epstein’s misdeeds a secret for him.
In additional emails, Epstein suggested that Trump had secrets of his own.
“You see, I know how dirty Donald is,” Epstein said in one of his correspondences in 2018.
In another, Epstein described himself as “the one able to take [Trump] down.”
Despite campaigning in 2024 on possibly releasing the files himself, Trump has tried to avoid releasing the files since February. This week, in a post on Truth Social, he described the situation as the “Epstein Hoax,” and warned his own party members against supporting a vote on releasing more files regarding the sex trafficking operation.
“Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap. … There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else,” Trump wrote.
Despite that message, GOP leaders in the House are predicting mass defections in support of releasing the documents.
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