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Sen. Ruben Gallego had a present for Speaker Mike Johnson. And he had to give it to him right away.
It didn’t matter that Christmas was more than a month away or that Gallego didn’t even have to be in the Capitol on Tuesday—the day after the Senate voted to reopen the government in a series of evening votes. Instead, dressed in blue slacks and a tan pullover, he went into the speaker’s office with a special gift: a copy of the memoirs of Virginia Giuffre, the late sex-trafficking victim of Jeffrey Epstein.
Needless to say, this was all filmed to be posted on the internet by the Arizona senator.
Gallego’s appearance at Johnson’s office is a sign of what’s next in Congress after the shutdown fight is resolved. Democrats are determined to make the conversation about Epstein—and particularly about President Donald Trump’s ties to the New York financier who ran a sex-trafficking ring.
Specifically, Democrats want to press for full disclosure of the so-called Epstein files, the documents in the possession of the Department of Justice about the ring and those who participated in it. The Epstein files have been a fixation for people across the political spectrum: Once a right-wing obsession among MAGA loyalists focused on the New York financier’s links to Bill and Hillary Clinton, it’s now become gospel among #resistance libs desperate for something to bring down Trump. Democrats have been pushing Epstein toward center stage for months, and elsewhere, it’s already spawned parallel scandals, which have included the former Prince Andrew being stripped of his royal status and consigned essentially to internal exile in the U.K.
But it will come to a head Wednesday when, after nearly two months, Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva is sworn into Congress, 50 days after winning election to the House of Representatives. Johnson had used the ongoing government shutdown as an excuse not to swear in the Arizona Democrat, who would be the final signature needed on a procedural motion to force a vote on a resolution to release all unclassified information about Epstein.
Yet even with victory so close at hand, Gallego was eager to take one more jab at Johnson, with whom he had a viral encounter a month ago over the Republican speaker’s refusal to swear in Grijalva, by dropping off a copy of Guiffre’s book with a receptionist.
Afterward, Gallego talked to Slate about why he adopted the issue. “It just was kind of a slow trickle, you know, a lot of us had heard about this years ago,” he said while sitting in the Rotunda of the Capitol. He then noted the spiraling sequence of events this year, starting with Epstein’s former girlfriend and longtime fixer Ghislaine Maxwell first being moved to a low-security prison followed by her two-day-long meeting with Todd Blanche, Trump’s deputy attorney general. “It just keeps on pointing to powerful people trying to protect powerful people,” he said. For him, it finally culminated with Johnson, whom he referred to as “a doofus,” blocking Grijalva from being seated for months.
For Gallego, all the efforts to stymie the release of Epstein-related information suggest “there is something really explosive to some very, very powerful men.” Trump’s behavior around the Epstein files, he said, was simply “weird.” Gallego added, “And it tells me there’s something that he’s embarrassed about. And maybe it’s not him, maybe it’s one of his really, really, really close friends and powerful friends.”
Yet the question is how much this matters to voters. Democrats’ efforts to focus attention on Epstein is part of a broader political strategy to sully Trump and the MAGA movement ahead of next year’s midterms, hoping to claw back enough power in Congress to slow down Trump’s agenda. On Wednesday morning, new emails released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, show that Epstein suggested in a 2011 email that Trump had at least some knowledge of his illegal activities.
But even Gallego conceded, “I’m not sure if this has anything to do with voters, where voters actually would care this much.” He added, “I do think that everyday Americans want justice, and that’s why we need to deliver this, not really for any kind of movement in the voting booth or anything like that.”
Certainly the 2026 midterm elections are not going to be fought by candidates focusing solely on Epstein. The question is how much this will even factor into the campaign at all or if it will simply remain fodder for cable news chyrons.
Zac McCrary, a top Democrats pollster, told Slate that the Epstein issue has a certain “stickiness” with voters. “A lot of people tune out of things like the shutdown … but almost everybody knows some element of the Epstein scandal.” He could foresee it being an element in paid communications during the midterms “as a bit of throw in” to emphasize how out-of-touch a Republican incumbent was. But it would be at best a jab and not a knockout blow in the campaign.
Other operatives in both parties broadly agreed that the impact would not be significant. One Republican operative gibed that “no one really cares, it’s just something to talk about.” Another Democratic operative simply thought it served to reinforce underlying messages that Trump and Republicans care more about the wealthy and well-connected than about the average American.
The long-term risk is that any Epstein focus helps egg on the conspiracies that have been stoked around him in recent years by partisan actors on both sides of the aisle. Ever since Epstein took his own life in prison in 2019, online speculation has swirled trying to form even grander patterns around the already grotesque tale of a wealthy man who was able to avoid consequences for his illegal actions for decades.
A criminal career that’s almost too tawdry and over the top even for a Law & Order episode has been transmuted by the internet to a made-for-Reddit smorgasbord of conspiracy theories—ranging from that Epstein was murdered in prison to that he was running an elaborate blackmail operation for unnamed intelligence agencies. On the left it has become a version of QAnon for wine moms convinced that an Epstein list will bring down Trump the way Russian kompromat never did. On the right, it’s just become an extension of QAnon, and “Epstein Island” has simply replaced a D.C. pizza shop as the locale where Democrats commit sordid crimes. All is helped along by Epstein’s politically diverse range of social acquaintances in New York around the turn of the 21st century.
Gallego noted that it’s a tough balance to strike because “there’s going to be a want for something that is huge and explosive. At the end of the day, we have to focus on the facts and focus on making sure that these victims aren’t being revictimized because we’re not going after the perpetrators. I think this is why it’s important that we open up everything to make sure that we can take a real look at this without actually engaging conspiracy theories.”
But, after 10 years of Trump stoking conspiracy theories and freely using inflammatory rhetoric for political gain, going well past the facts isn’t something Democrats would hold back for fear of the long-term cost. As the Democratic operative put it, “We’re playing by a new set of rules now.”
