When Speaker Mike Johnson abruptly recessed the House early in July for fear of a revolt over the so-called Epstein files, it was evident that there would be other news to capture our attention while everyone was away. With just days to go until they return, those who had hoped Epstein would fall by the wayside could be disappointed. 

Welcome to Washington, where the capital is quiet as members of Congress enjoy their last week of vacation before the September slog comes. The government must be funded by the end of next month, and Senate Republicans will need all of their members plus at least seven Democrats to get on board with any deal. 

The process of funding the government will be an ugly one. Hardline conservatives will likely object to any continuing resolution that keeps the government open for a few weeks or months, and more liberal lawmakers are almost certainly going to embrace their Tea Party tactics in battling with the president. 

Hanging over the annual scramble to keep the lights on will be one thing and one thing only: Jeffrey Epstein. Those same hardline conservatives likely to be a pain for the president in funding the government will be the ones demanding release of even more information about the deceased sex offender. 

After the Department of Justice in early July stated in a memo that there were no Epstein files to be released going forward, many in the MAGA movement refused to give up their demands for more information about Epstein. 

“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People,” Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X more than a week after the justice department announced it would release no additional information. 

“If not … The base will turn and there’s no going back,” the Georgia congresswoman wrote. 

This past week, the justice department released transcripts and recordings of its much-discussed interviews with Ghislaine Maxwell, who has been convicted of child sex trafficking and was a longtime associate of Epstein. 

Reports featured key quotes from Maxwell in the hundreds of pages of interview transcripts that were released. She met with the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, and other government officials as part of her attempt to buy goodwill with the administration. 

“I do not believe he died by suicide, no,” Maxwell said at one point of the long-running belief by many that Epstein killed himself while awaiting trial at New York. When asked if Epstein kept a list of individuals who he knew had had sex with minors, Maxwell responded curtly: “Absolutely not, no. There is no list.”

“I never witnessed the president in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody,” she said at another point, defending Mr. Trump. 

The interviews with Maxwell, while illuminating, are unlikely to quell the steady drum of MAGA demands for release of more Epstein files, or even for Maxwell’s own public testimony before Congress. She has demanded immunity for any such testimony, which Republicans say they will not grant. 

The House and Senate are due to return for their September sessions the day after Labor Day. On Wednesday next week — the day after lawmakers return — a bipartisan group will be hosting Epstein’s own victims at the Capitol. 

Congressman Thomas Massie, a libertarian-aligned Republican, and Congressman Ro Khanna, a liberal Democrat, are holding a press conference alongside a group of those who allegedly endured abuse by Epstein. Those victims’ attorneys will also speak to the press just steps from the United States Capitol. 

“Three decades of coverups, failures, and payoffs,” Mr. Massie wrote on X on Wednesday of the Epstein saga. “Consider the magnitude of relevant evidence that hasn’t been released.” Messrs. Massie and Khanna already have a bill to force the disclosure of more Epstein files by the justice department, and it will almost certainly come to the floor within weeks, if not days. 

If the House’s rules around forcing votes on the floor are not changed, then the bill is on track to pass, likely with a significant number of Mr. Trump’s own friends supporting it — further inflaming both the MAGA base and the Democrats who want to see the president suffer.