By Nandita Bose
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump's administration for weeks tried to stall or head off a vote in Congress to force the release of investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, but nonetheless the measure is expected to land on his desk as soon as Wednesday.
A months-long member-led drive in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives succeeded on Tuesday, prompting swift and nearly unanimous votes in that chamber and the Senate to force the release of U.S. Justice Department
files on Epstein, the late convicted sex offender and New York financier who fraternized with some of the most influential men in the country.
Epstein's onetime friendship with Trump has bedeviled the Republican president in his second term, partly because Trump amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein to his own supporters.
Trump socialized and partied with Epstein in the 1990s and 2000s before what he calls a rift. Now many Trump voters believe his administration has covered up Epstein’s ties to powerful figures and obscured details surrounding his death in a Manhattan jail, which was ruled a suicide while Trump was president in 2019.
After a long campaign to try to prevent the vote, Trump reversed course late Sunday night and urged House passage. But even as he did so, White House aides were trying to amend it in the Senate, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
One of the sources said the West Wing had leaned into relationships with Senate leadership in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to keep the House version from advancing as written.
After the Senate approved the measure on Tuesday, a senior White House official said Trump will sign the bill when it gets to the White House.
LIMIT TO TRUMP'S POWER?
The episode underscores the limits of Trump's control over his party. Despite weeks of strategy and direct pressure on lawmakers - including a long delay in swearing in a newly elected Democratic lawmaker - congressional Republicans moved ahead against his wishes.
The fight has taken a toll on Trump's public approval, which fell to its lowest point this year in a Reuters/Ipsos poll concluded on Monday. It found that just 44% of Republicans thought Trump was handling the Epstein situation well.
Another 60% of Americans believed the federal government was hiding information about Epstein's death and 70% believed it was hiding information about people involved in his sex crimes. A majority of Trump's Republicans shared those suspicions.
The incident also soured relations with one of his strongest Republican supporters in Congress, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said Trump had worried the focus on Epstein would distract from his other priorities.
“President Trump has never been against releasing the Epstein files - rather, he has always been against Republicans falling into the Democrat trap of talking about this rather than focusing on the historic tax cuts signed into law, the fact that zero illegal aliens have entered our country in five months, and the many other accomplishments of the Trump Administration on behalf of the American people," Jackson said.
WHITE HOUSE AIMED FOR 'MESSAGING AND MANAGEMENT'
Epstein pleaded guilty to a Florida state felony prostitution charge in 2008 and served 13 months in jail. The U.S. Justice Department charged him with sex trafficking of minors in 2019. Epstein had pleaded not guilty to those charges before his death.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing and the investigative material to date has yet to reveal any specific compromising details, though House Democrats last week released a 2019 email from Epstein that cryptically contended Trump "knew about the girls."
Over the weekend, White House aides prepared for a period of "messaging and management," one source said, viewing the Senate as the last opportunity to influence how the bill would proceed, the sources said.
The White House over the weekend encouraged senators to frame any slowdown as responsible oversight and circulated tailored talking points to vulnerable Republicans, urging them to frame the vote as transparency while quickly steering the conversation back to affordability.
By late Sunday afternoon, top White House aides and the president had concluded the strategy was failing, and tried to pivot from prevention to damage control, the sources said.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington; writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Scott Malone and Stephen Coates)
