Swearing in of Democrat Adelita Grijalva 7 weeks after winning House election could force vote on releasing Epstein files

Adelita Grijalva will be sworn in on Wednesday by Speaker Mike Johnson, his office said on Tuesday, ending weeks of delays and likely triggering a vote in the House of Representatives around the release of the Department of Justice’s trove of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

The speaker’s office made the announcement Tuesday afternoon, as Congress appeared to be on the brink of ending the longest federal government shutdown in history. Johnson previously said that Grijalva’s swearing-in would be delayed until the shutdown ended.

Democrats in the chamber have loudly insisted for weeks that Johnson’s real aim in delaying Grijalva’s swearing-in was to prevent a vote on a resolution co-sponsored by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Ro Khanna (D-California) which, with Grijalva’s signature, will be forced to the House floor as privileged legislation. With the votes of every Democrat in the chamber and several Republicans, it’s expected to pass in an embarrassing defeat for the Trump administration.

Grijalva won a special election for the seat vacated by the passing of her father, former Rep. Raul Grijalva, in September. Her father died in March, during his 12th term in Congress.

Khanna and Massie struck an alliance on the Epstein files after the Trump administration went back on its word to release more information pertaining to the investigation of Epstein earlier this year. Convicted of sex offences, Epstein was a pedophile and sex trafficker who enjoyed connections with many powerful and high-profile men and women during his life, including Britain’s former Prince, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, and U.S. political figures like Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.

In the spring of 2025, Trump and his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, summoned right-wing influencers such as Jack Posobiec to the White House to receive binders labeled “phase one” of the Department of Justice’s Epstein document dump. Further releases did not come to pass, and the DoJ eventually released a joint statement with the FBI walking back many previous positions: the agencies now claimed that a “list” of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators never existed, and said that future releases of information would harm victims of sex abuse.

Bondi and her top deputy, FBI Director Kash Patel, have reportedly clashed in private over Bondi’s handling of the situation. It was the attorney general, in a Fox interview, who claimed (after that initial “phase one” event at the White House) that a folder pertaining to the Epstein investigation and the supposed client list was “on her desk”.

Trump and others including the former prince have denied committing any illegal activities with Epstein, who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 during Trump’s first term.

The manner of the sex trafficker’s death in a Manhattan detention facility notorious for its poor conditions and sloppy oversight remains a huge controversy. Many skeptics question whether Epstein’s death, ruled a suicide, was staged and in the wake of his death two prison guards admitted to falsifying records on the night of the incident. The Justice Department, in 2025, released security camera footage of the area outside of Epstein’s cell on the night of his death, but the video showed signs of editing and initially contained a minute of missing footage, fueling conspiracies.

This is a breaking news report. More to follow…