Following overwhelming support in the House of Representatives, 427 votes in favor and one against, the 100 members of the United States Senate unanimously supported on Tuesday sending the Epstein Papers Transparency Act to the White House without changes, which requires the Department of Justice to declassify documents related to the case of the millionaire pedophile.

They did so hours before the text even reached them for review and a subsequent vote. This means that as soon as it arrives in the Senate, which is expected to happen in the next few hours, it will automatically go to President Donald Trump's desk. Despite having opposed the release of these materials for months, he has promised to sign it as soon as possible.

The rush was instigated by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who, around 5:00 p.m. (Washington time), just hours after the House vote, forced what is known in Capitol Hill jargon as"unanimous consent," thus eliminating the possibility of the bill stalling in the Senate."This is about giving the American people the transparency they have been demanding," Schumer said before pushing for the bill's passage."Jeffrey Epstein's victims have waited long enough."

It is unclear whether the US president will sign it on Tuesday evening, when he is scheduled to have dinner with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Trump received at the White House that morning to say that the horrific 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, is “one of those things that happens.” US intelligence services confirmed bin Salman’s involvement.

The president's response

Trump, who is often incensed by the Epstein papers scandal, reacted to the news that the Senate was also considering its release with a message on his social media account, Truth. “I don’t care when it passes, whether it’s tonight or sometime in the near future; I just don’t want Republicans to lose sight of all the victories we’ve achieved,” he wrote, before proceeding to list those achievements using lies, half-truths, and exaggerations.

After weeks of pressure to the contrary, the president, who was a friend of Epstein for 15 years, gave permission last Sunday to members of his party in Congress to vote in favor of the bill. Although he didn't go as far as he could: he has the power to order the release of these files without the need for Capitol Hill approval, but he has chosen not to. These files could reveal the involvement of dozens of wealthy and influential men in the pedophile's sex trafficking ring, as well as the complicity of financial institutions and judicial bodies, or the failures of the authorities that allowed him to act with impunity.

It is also unclear what the next steps will be once Trump signs the law, as he has promised. Nor is it clear when or how the Justice Department will fulfill its obligation to release the files. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced last July that her department did not intend to release those documents, despite having promised for months that it would.

In his hands are millions of unpublished documents containing information about Epstein's sex trafficking ring. It is expected that these will also include information about who was aware of or involved in it between the early 1990s and his death (a suicide, according to the coroner). He died in 2019 while being held in a maximum-security cell in Manhattan.

The question now is whether the Justice Department intends to resist, arguing that there are ongoing judicial investigations. Everything hinges on whether or not the US president's orders to Attorney General Bondi to investigate the millionaire pedophile's connections to prominent Democrats bear fruit.

Last Friday, Trump asked Bondi, in a move that violates the principle of separation of powers in this country, to open investigations only against prominent Democrats whose names have appeared in the successive releases of documents. He cited three: former President Bill Clinton; Larry Summers, former president of Harvard; and Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman.

US law prohibits the release of trial summary materials while a trial remains active, and Democrats fear the Trump Administration will use that as justification to continue refusing to release the files.