Trump Bondi Epstein
Conservative lawmakers defy GOP leadership to support Epstein subpoena of Attorney General Bondi, risking fallout before 2026 midterms. X

Five House Republicans just voted to subpoena their own party's attorney general. That doesn't happen often.

On 4 March, the House Oversight Committee approved a motion 24-19 to compel Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the Justice Department's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. The next day, the DOJ released documents it admitted were 'incorrectly coded as duplicative,' files containing uncorroborated accusations against President Donald Trump that should have been public months ago.

The timing raised eyebrows. So did the bipartisan vote.

The Republicans Who Crossed Party Lines

These people broke with their party to support the subpoena. These aren't moderates in safe seats. They're conservative lawmakers who've calculated that blocking transparency on the Epstein files carries more political risk than defying GOP leadership.

  • Nancy Mace of South Carolina
  • Tim Burchett of Tennessee
  • Michael Cloud of Texas
  • Lauren Boebert of Colorado
  • Scott Perry of Pennsylvania

November 2026 midterms loom. Voters are watching.

'AG Bondi claims the DOJ has released all of the Epstein files. The record is clear: they have not,' Mace wrote on X after the vote. 'Three million documents have been released, and we still don't have the full truth. Videos are missing. Audio is missing. Logs are missing.'

Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who co-sponsored the Epstein Transparency Act, called it a straightforward accountability issue. 'It's about transparency,' he told ABC News. 'It has nothing to do with being a Democrat or a Republican. It's about going after predators.'

What the 'Coding Error' Actually Means

The DOJ blamed the missing files on a clerical mistake. Officials said the documents were tagged as duplicates when they weren't.

'When flagged by the public, we immediately work to correct any errors that the team may have initially made,' the department said, according to CNBC.

The newly released records include FBI interview summaries with a woman who contacted agents after Epstein's 2019 arrest. She made accusations against Trump, though the DOJ noted in January that some documents contain 'untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election.' Trump has denied all wrongdoing connected to Epstein.

Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has alleged that searching Trump's name in unredacted files returned 'more than a million' results. He later clarified to Axios that he searched 'Trump' and 'Donald or Don,' and couldn't verify each result individually. The figure remains unconfirmed.

What Raskin did confirm: he found a 2009 email exchange between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell that he says contradicts Trump's claim that he expelled Epstein from Mar-a-Lago years earlier.

Street Art Goes Viral

Public anger has spilled beyond Capitol Hill. On 1 March, a guerrilla art installation dubbed the 'Jeffrey Epstein Walk of Shame' appeared in Farragut Square, a five-minute walk from the White House.

The stickers mimic Hollywood's Walk of Fame but feature Epstein's face and names of figures mentioned in DOJ files. Each carries a QR code linking to department documents or news articles. Names include Bill Clinton, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and the imprisoned Ghislaine Maxwell. A sticker for Elon Musk was torn off within hours, though its QR code remained.

The installation spread across social media within a day.

For many Americans, the Epstein case represents something personal: the belief that the powerful escape consequences ordinary people can't avoid. The bipartisan subpoena suggests that at least some lawmakers sense that frustration won't stay quiet through another election cycle.

Bondi hasn't confirmed when she'll testify. But five Republicans just made clear she won't have a choice.

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