A bipartisan group of lawmakers stood outside the US Capitol on Wednesday alongside nearly a dozen women who said they'd been abused by the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein with a poignant message: This is not a hoax. That included a direct plea from one of the survivors, Anouska de Georgiou, to the president: "President Trump, you have so much influence and power in this situation. Please use that influence and power to help us." And an invite extended to him from another abuse survivor, Haley Robson: "I cordially invite you to the Capitol to meet me in person so you can understand this is not a hoax. We are real human beings. This is real trauma." Yet just moments after those survivors spoke, President Donald Trump delivered his own remarks, dismissing the escalating national political furor over the Epstein case files as a "Democrat hoax." "What they're trying to do with the Epstein hoax is get people to talk about that," Trump said from the Oval Office Wednesday. "We're having the most successful eight months of any president ever, and that's what I want to talk about." Trump delivered his remarks at the White House just down the street from where a crowd overtook the steps of the Capitol to hear from lawmakers and Epstein survivors about why Congress needs to demand more transparency from the executive branch related to Epstein's crimes. It's the most concerted push yet by those lawmakers and survivors – some of whom had never spoken publicly before – to force Congress to act. Notably, it's not just the president's political adversaries who are backing the push. Among the lawmakers who took the podium was one of Trump's closest personal allies, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Her support is a clear signal that the president won't soon be able to escape the scrutiny over his administration's handling of the Epstein investigation. "This is not about politics. This is a boiling point in American history," Greene said in a fiery speech in which she vowed to support the survivors in any way possible. Speaking to CNN after the press conference, Greene said she spoke with Trump personally earlier that morning and urged him to host Epstein's victims in the Oval Office. The appearances by Trump and the Epstein survivors marked an extraordinary moment in a months-long battle for his government to release additional documents and information related to the disgraced financier. As Speaker Mike Johnson and GOP leaders in Congress attempt to quell the backlash over Trump's handling of the controversy, Republicans like Greene have breathed new life into the fight. Greene is one of four Republicans who have so far signed onto this week's bipartisan push to force Congress to require the White House to publicly disclose more information from the case. The effort, known as a discharge petition, is led by Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a fiercely independent Republican who frequently spars with Trump. But both Greene and Massie argued the matter should be above politics. They urged more of their GOP colleagues to back their resolution — allowing the measure to come to the floor for a vote, a major affront to Johnson's powers as speaker. "There's over 200 Republicans who have not signed this discharge petition. We only need two of them to sign it," Massie said at the press conference, where he vowed not to back down from the fight. Johnson has argued publicly and privately that Massie's discharge petition "has been made moot and unnecessary" because of the House Oversight Committee's work, and he pointed Wednesday to the more than 33,000 documents released by the panel less than 24 hours before. "What we're going to do is effectively deputize the Oversight Committee, which is the committee of appropriate jurisdiction, to go do a deep dive on this. And I think they're going to uncover things that have never been uncovered before," the Louisiana Republican said. Democrats were quick to point out, however, that most of the material released by the committee contained information that had already been publicly available. The party has sought to weaponize the Epstein issue against Trump and the GOP in recent weeks, trying to force votes that would put vulnerable Republicans in difficult positions. But the tone of Wednesday's press conference was far less partisan. "I've never done a press conference with Marjorie Taylor Greene before," Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, a staunch liberal from California, said of the firebrand Georgia Republican as the crowd laughed. An attorney for numerous Epstein survivors said they would hold Johnson and lawmakers accountable. "I can tell you that in the Oversight Committee meeting yesterday, they indicated that they were all for transparency, releasing the files, and asked us to hold them accountable. ... So we intend to hold them accountable," Brad Edwards said at the news conference. Speaking to CNN before, Massie accused the Trump administration of redacting certain information — such as Epstein's flight logs — "to prevent embarrassment" for Trump's donors and friends. "I don't think he's implicated in these files, but I think his donors are. I think his friends are. And I think our own DOJ and government are implicated in this too. So you can't trust them," Massie said. — CNN
