The voice vote on the Epstein files
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The voice vote on the Epstein files is John Kiriakou's account of the procedural manoeuvre by which the Senate passed the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files in November 2025, and of why he treats it as a demonstration of bipartisan self-protection rather than of accountability.

Being wrong first

A viewer opened by pointing out that Kiriakou and his co-host on another programme had predicted the Senate would block the release, and that the bill had just passed. He conceded without qualification. "Yes, I do have some thoughts. So we were wrong about that, for a reason that developed very quickly."

The reason was presidential. "John Thune, the Senate majority leader, had said several times over the past week that he was not going to allow this thing to come to a vote. But night before last, Donald Trump urged Republicans to vote yes. They voted yes."

The House margin made the position untenable. "The final vote in the House was 417 to one", the one being, in Kiriakou's characterisation, "just a piece of trash from, I think it was, Texas or Louisiana." Thune, he says, "realised that the train had left the station and it was barrelling right toward him, and so he decided to get on the right side of this."

The rescue

What interests Kiriakou is not the outcome but the method, which he introduces as "another indication of the insider corruption that are both parties."

"To save Thune, Chuck Schumer asked for a voice vote. All those in favour say aye. Aye. All those opposed. The ayes have it. Just like that." Asked whether that was really the length of time it took, he confirmed it, and confirmed the consequence: "They didn't do a roll call. No, there was no roll call vote. And so there is no written record of how anybody voted."

What the record now permits

The absence of a record is, in his reading, the entire product of the exercise. "And now literally everybody but this clown from Louisiana can say: I stood up against the pedophiles. I stood up against Epstein."

On whether the president would then sign it, Kiriakou reported only that he had said he would, and passed on the newspaper's caveat, "sure, he's going to sign it, and then who's going to ensure that he actually does it?", alongside the standing escape route of an ongoing investigation.

The passage is one of the sharper statements of a theme Kiriakou returns to constantly: that the two parties compete in public and cooperate in procedure, and that the procedural cooperation is where the real alignment shows.

See also

- Epstein Files Transparency Act
- Jeffrey Epstein
- Donald Trump
- The Epstein files and the Starmer government
