Mike Johnson
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Mike Johnson was Speaker of the House during the fight over release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Rather than let the House vote

Before the discharge petition there was the Rules Committee, and Kiriakou's account of that stage is the sharpest thing he says about Johnson. The Speaker "did not want his own Republican party to vote" on the motion brought before the committee that decides which bills reach the floor, a bill to demand the release of all the Epstein information. Kiriakou calls the position counterintuitive on its face: the president said he wanted the information released, the attorney general said she wanted it released, and the American people wanted it released, "and then Mike Johnson says, 'Oh my god, we can't allow a vote to release the information.'"

The explanation Kiriakou reports is partisan arithmetic rather than principle, the bill had been sponsored by Democrats, so passing it would hand them a cheap political victory, notwithstanding that Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene were pressing for release from the Republican side.

What Johnson did next is the part Kiriakou keeps returning to: "He shut down the House of Representatives and sent everybody home until September. So not only is there not going to be a vote to force the release of this information, there's not going to be a vote on anything of any kind. Literally nothing will happen on Capitol Hill because there is nobody on Capitol Hill."

The subcommittee strategy

John Kiriakou's reading of Johnson's handling is procedural rather than rhetorical. The plan, he says, was to send the matter to a subcommittee and let it wither and die there, on the assumption that everyone would forget about it, "He didn't expect a Democrat and a Republican to come together and file a discharge petition." Once the petition had the 218 votes and there was nothing he could do to stop a floor vote, Kiriakou believes Johnson simply relied on the Senate majority leader to kill it, leaving the president able to say he had told everybody to vote for release.

Forced to the floor again

The pattern repeats outside the Epstein files. Discussing War Powers Act votes in March 2026, Kiriakou said the reporting that morning was that Johnson "is going to sort of be forced to allowing a vote" on the War Powers Act in the House, and predicted it would not help, because "Democrats are all going to vote yes because they're just as big warmongers as the Republicans are."

Communism and the midterms

On Johnson's midterm framing, that the country faces a choice between remaining a constitutional republic and going "down some road towards a communist utopia", Kiriakou is dismissive. Nobody is seeking a communist utopia, he says; what is being sought is a broader and deeper social safety net, and the members in question number four out of 435, nine-tenths of one per cent.

His verdict is that Johnson is "either an idiot or he's a liar," and that personally he thinks both. The counter-argument he puts to the Speaker directly: the United States already runs Social Security, the highway system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, public education, Medicare and Medicaid, "You don't like it? You're the speaker of the house. Take it away if you think it's communism."

See also

- Epstein Files Transparency Act
- Jeffrey Epstein
- Democratic redistricting collapse
