When the United States awoke from the longest government shutdown in its history, Jeffrey Epstein was still there.

During the 43 days that the public money tap remained partially closed, the memory of the terrible crimes of the pedophile millionaire—which, since his death in 2019, has haunted Donald Trump—took a back seat to other urgent matters: from the payment of food stamps for 42 million people at risk of hunger to the thousands of flights canceled due to the shortage of air traffic controllers.

Once that crisis was overcome—and once the House of Representatives, along with the Administration, was reopened—the refusal to release the materials in its possession regarding the case has once again put the White House on the ropes and reopened the rift between the president and a faction of the Republican Party. This faction, upon returning to work on Wednesday, signed a petition to force a vote in Congress and demand that the White House release the Epstein files that are “on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s desk.”

Four Republicans — Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert — joined their rivals to gather the 218 signatures needed to demand the release of that dossier, parts of which have been revealed over the years.

The latest revelation came this Wednesday and unfolded in two stages. First, with the three emails released by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee in which Epstein says that Trump “spent hours with one of the financier’s victims” and that he “knew about the girls,” referring to the underage victims. Then, it was the turn of the more than 20,000 documents published unfiltered by the Republicans, which confirm the billionaire’s extensive network of powerful connections and that he closely followed Trump until his death (ruled by suicide by the coroner and the government, although conspiracy theories abound that question this).

And so, what should have been a glorious day for the President of the United States, a day to celebrate that the Republicans had forced their rivals in the Senate to reopen the government with little in return, turned into just another day in the bad streak Trump is currently experiencing. In just a few days, his party has suffered a crushing defeat at the polls, the Supreme Court has expressed skepticism about the constitutionality of his tariffs, and a civil war has erupted within the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement over how much (anti-Semitic) extremism is acceptable within its ranks, following the controversial interview between Tucker Carlson and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

Trump urged his supporters on his social media platform, Truth, not to be"distracted from what's important," in a thinly veiled attempt to pressure them against voting to release the Epstein papers. This effort only fuels suspicions that he has something to hide.

The president even summoned one of the dissidents, Lauren Boebert, for questioning. According to US media reports, he asked some of his closest allies to pressure her in such an imposing (and secretive) place as the Situation Room, the setting for such grave decisions as those that initiate wars or determine the best way to assassinate Osama Bin Laden. It was no use: Boebert left with the same conviction with which she had entered.

In the White House Crisis Room

Johnson was thus forced to call a vote on the pedophile's files after months of avoiding it with all sorts of tricks. It will be next week. If the proposal passes in the House of Representatives, where the Republican Party is preparing for more defections (“between 40 and 50,” according to Massie, one of its promoters), it may not pass in the Senate. It could also face a presidential veto.

Boebert and Greene belong to the far-right wing of the party, a faction not exactly inclined to join forces with the Democrats. In one of those classic Washington contortions, the Democrats, who for years dismissed as a hoax the far-right's conspiratorial obsession with what those papers might contain about Epstein's wealthy and powerful friends—such as former President Bill Clinton or former Prince Andrew of England—saw themselves at the forefront of the demonstration demanding to see them.

And nothing indicates they're going to let go."It's very similar to the zeal they showed during his first presidency with the Russian interference hoax," Laura Loomer, an activist with MAGA, wrote in Politico. MAGA, the movement that rose up against its leader after learning in July that Bondi would not release the Epstein papers he had promised for months, has now received the latest news with a certain indifference, perhaps because they don't quite see themselves sharing the same fixations as the so-called mainstream press.

The newly declassified documents contain no evidence that Trump was aware of the crimes of his former friend of 15 years, until their falling out in 2004. The president maintains that they parted ways when he kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club for his “freak” behavior with some employees. In the messages, the convicted sex offender denies that this was the reason. There is also an email in which Epstein appears to suggest that he spent Thanksgiving 2017 with Trump, the new president's first Thanksgiving, although there is no evidence that this actually happened.

The White House accuses Democrats of selecting certain emails to damage Trump and of deliberately omitting the name of the victim who, according to Epstein,"spent hours" with him. This victim, said White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, is Virginia Giuffre, who committed suicide in April, a month after being struck by a bus in Australia, where she lived.

Leavitt also recalled that Giuffre told the judge she had not seen Trump have sex with minors during the time she spent with Epstein and his fixer, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence as an accomplice in the financier's sex trafficking ring. In her recently published posthumous memoirs, Giuffre writes that Trump could not have been"more friendly" to her.

Republicans now turning against Trump are also struggling to reconcile reports this week that Maxwell is receiving preferential treatment after being transferred to a minimum-security jail in Texas. This came after she spoke for nine hours, spread over two days, with Justice Department envoy Todd Blanche, Trump's lawyer. A source told the Oversight Committee that the warden is allowing Maxwell to enjoy a special menu and is helping her with the paperwork to request a pardon from Trump.