Thomas Massie stood on the House floor Monday night and read fourteen names into the record, and by Tuesday morning almost every outlet covering it had led with the list.
The list is the least important thing that happened.
Here is the part that got left out of the first paragraph nearly everywhere: the Justice Department has already conceded to a federal judge that it is violating the law Massie is trying to enforce. Not “faces allegations that it violated.” Conceded. That admission is sitting in a federal court docket in Washington, it has been there since the summer, and it is the entire reason a second Epstein transparency bill exists at all. The Epstein Files Transparency Act is Public Law 119-38. President Trump signed it on November 19, 2025. It gave the Attorney General thirty days to publish the department’s unclassified Epstein files in a searchable, downloadable format, which set a hard deadline of December 19, 2025. That deadline is now more than eight months gone.
The Concession Already on the Record
The compliance fight landed in front of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan after an independent journalist sued over the material the department was holding back. Sullivan found that the administration had likely violated the terms of the statute, and in doing so he pointed at something the government had already given away in its own filings.
The Attorney General has conceded that he is in violation of the Act.
Sullivan gave the department a deadline of July 2 to either produce the documents with fewer redactions or explain, item by item, why the redactions should survive. NBC News reported that in subsequent hearings government lawyers struggled to account for their own redaction decisions. Pam Bondi, who ran the department when the first tranche went out and whom Trump later fired, has since told lawmakers that “redaction errors” occurred during the release.
The volume is not in dispute either. The Democracy Defenders Fund, which has filed three separate requests for an inspector general audit of the process, puts the count at roughly three million documents released out of about six million the department collected, while the department publicly maintains it has complied.
So the position of the United States government is that it has complied with a statute it has separately admitted to a judge it is violating. Both of those things cannot be true, and only one of them was said under penalty of anything.
A Bill Whose Main Provision Is a Lawsuit
Read the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, which Massie introduced with Ro Khanna, Teresa Leger FernΓ‘ndez, Jeff Merkley and Ben Ray LujΓ‘n, and the tell is right there in the mechanics. The bill does not mostly expand what has to be released. It creates people who are allowed to sue about it. State attorneys general get standing to take the Justice Department to court when it unlawfully withholds, redacts or delays. Victims, state prosecutors and members of Congress get expanded access and new avenues to challenge what has been held back.
That is not a transparency bill. That is an enforcement bill, and you only need an enforcement bill when the first law turned out to be a suggestion.
Congress wrote the original statute with a deadline and no teeth. It named no penalty, created no private right of action, and left compliance entirely to the good faith of the agency being compelled. The department read that correctly and did the math. Missing a deadline that carries no consequence is not really missing a deadline.
Why the Number 218 Is the Real Story
Massie is now collecting signatures on a discharge petition, and he needs 218 of them to force the bill onto the floor. NBC News has the mechanics of that push.
Sit with what a discharge petition means. It is the procedure a member uses when leadership will not schedule a bill. Massie is a Republican. His party controls the chamber. He is going around his own leadership because his own leadership will not give him a vote.
This has happened before, and LNC covered it at the time. The original bill passed this same House 427 to 1, which is about as close to unanimous as a modern Congress gets on anything. Then, when the department blew through the deadline, the Oversight Committee’s Democrats forced a vote to hold Bondi in contempt and the committee’s Republicans blocked it. The same institution that voted 427 to 1 to demand the files would not use the one tool it actually holds to make the demand stick.
That is the structural why here, and it is more damning than any list of names. Congress does not lack the power to enforce its own statute. It has contempt, it has appropriations, it has subpoenas and it has the confirmation calendar. It lacks the willingness. A legislature that responds to executive defiance by drafting a second law, rather than using the leverage it already has on the first, is teaching every future administration exactly what noncompliance costs.
The Names Carry a Cost
About those fourteen names, which included Jes Staley, Leon Black, Les Wexner, Tom Pritzker, Glenn Dubin, David Copperfield, Jean-Luc Brunel, Lesley Groff and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew. PBS NewsHour has the full list and the footage.
Several of those people have appeared before the House committee investigating Epstein. None of them has been charged with an Epstein-related crime, and being named in a floor speech, or appearing in records, establishes nothing legally. Massie used the Speech or Debate Clause to say out loud what he cannot be sued for saying, which is a legitimate tool and also a blunt one.
We think he was right to use it, and we think the coverage that treated the list as the story got played. The names were the price of admission for the cameras. What Massie actually wants is 218 signatures, and the reason he has to want that is the reason nobody put in a headline.
What Should Happen Now
The Justice Department should stop litigating redactions it has already conceded are unlawful and produce the remaining files, and if it will not, the House should use contempt rather than write itself a fresh statute to ignore. The inspector general audit the Democracy Defenders Fund has requested three times should be opened. And the members who voted 427 to 1 in November 2025 should be asked, on the record and before November, whether they will sign the discharge petition, because that signature is now the only meaningful measure of whether that vote was real.
Nine months after a deadline set by a law the President signed, the government’s own position is that it is both compliant and in violation. Congress can resolve that with a subpoena and a contempt referral this month, or it can spend another year drafting Act III.