July 27, 2025

Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell.

The mass starvation in Gaza, now being widely reported, has begun to overtake other narratives in the conflict. People desperate for food risk danger and death at the few aid distribution centers available. Israel has responded by announcing that it will begin halting military operations for 10 hours a day in some parts of Gaza to allow aid to enter the country. President Donald Trump, golfing in Scotland, called the situation “terrible” on Sunday. Prime Minister Keir Starmer plans to bring it up when they meet on Monday, according to the BBC.

Meanwhile, like much of Washington, I’ve been tracking the Jeffrey Epstein drama, which comprises the majority of tonight’s issue. It’s one of the most interesting political stories of the moment, in part because it defies everything we’ve come to accept about the Trump brand. For perhaps the first time, the president has bungled messaging around an issue that’s backfiring with the most loyal elements of his base. Not since January 6 has Trump seen this level of dissent among his supporters—including Rep. Brian Jack, an otherwise close Trump ally, who voted in the House last week to subpoena the Justice Department for the so-called Epstein files.

But first…

Here comes Coop: Former Democratic North Carolina governor Roy Cooper is expected to announce his bid tomorrow to replace retiring Republican senator Thom Tillis. This race was already a top-tier pickup opportunity for Democrats, but party operatives are downright giddy about their chances now that Cooper is in the race. North Carolina has been a struggle for Democrats—Trump won the state in 2016, 2020, and 2024—but Cooper was on the ballot in two of those three elections, and won both times.

Meanwhile, Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley is also expected to announce his candidacy for the same seat this week, setting up what will be among the most expensive midterm contests in the nation. One Republican operative told me that it could be a $750 million race—an astronomical sum that would rival what Barack Obama raised during his first presidential campaign. (Not adjusted for inflation, of course.)

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Funding food fight: Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought has refused to commit to releasing congressional funding for the National Institutes of Health. When asked about it on Face the Nation this morning, he said NIH has been “weaponized” and that he will make a decision after a review of the funding is complete.

On Friday, eight of the 15 Republicans on the Senate Appropriations Committee joined six other Republicans urging Vought to release the funding. “We are concerned by the slow disbursement rate of FY25 NIH funds,” they wrote, noting that it risks research for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and more. “Suspension of these appropriated funds—whether formally withheld or functionally delayed—could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science.” The administration’s refusal to release funding that Congress has appropriated has also angered Democrats, who are demanding a commitment from the administration in next fiscal year’s funding bills. A government shutdown over issues like this is highly likely in the fall.

Plus, if you can’t get enough of Epstein, I encourage you to read my partner Bill Cohan’s reporting today on another way the D.O.J.’s files could finally be released…

William D. Cohan

Such is the level of consternation among Capitol Hill Republicans these days that Speaker Mike Johnson shut down the House early and told his fellow congressmen to get the heck out of Dodge until after Labor Day to avoid taking any votes on the issue. Not so long ago, you will recall, Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had the Epstein client list on her desk and was reviewing it for release to the public. Suddenly, now, there is nothing to see here. And still the plot thickens: On Thursday and Friday, Deputy A.G. Todd Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s defense attorney, “interviewed” Ghislaine at her Florida prison, where she is serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking. The Justice Department gave her limited immunity for the interviews. Could Trump grant her clemency in exchange for an exonerating statement? Asked about that scenario on Friday, he declined to rule it out.

And yet, despite all this, the Epstein files might still see the light of day. Loyal readers may recall that, in January 2022, I wrote about a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the enterprising First Amendment attorney Dan Novack. For years now, Novack, a pro bono FOIA attorney with his own eponymous firm who also serves as the associate general counsel at Penguin Random House, has been battling with the F.B.I. to unredact reams of documents in the Epstein case, to no avail. But his luck may be about to change...

[Read the full story here]

Now for the main event…

Johnson Loses the Epstein Caucus

The House speaker’s strategy to bury the Epstein drama by sending Congress home for the summer has only delayed a reckoning that Trump himself set into motion. The defection of a few key Republican members shows the problem isn’t going away.

Leigh Ann Caldwell

When a House Oversight subcommittee voted to subpoena the Justice Department to release the so-called Epstein files last week, Georgia Rep. Brian Jack made a surprising decision. The freshman congressman and Trump loyalist, who served as the president’s political director during his first term and remains close with him and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, was one of three Republicans to vote with Democrats. House Republicans generally rely on Jack for insight into the president’s thinking, and he’s been given plum assignments, including candidate recruitment for House Republicans and a seat on the powerful Steering and Rules committees. And yet here he was openly defying Trump in support of a Democratic amendment that would force the D.O.J.’s hand and metastasize a fomenting political scandal.

But Jack was in political survivor mode. Two weeks ago, as one of the members of the House Rules Committee, he and other Republicans had voted against Epstein-related amendments pushed by Democrats, causing a backlash online and from voters and eventually halting business in the House, as I reported last week. The voters in Jack’s conservative district—the same ones who propelled him to victory in a Republican primary runoff, and then a 33-point drubbing of his Democratic opponent—were demanding transparency on the Epstein issue. By Wednesday, according to a lawmaker who spoke to him, Jack had decided he had no choice but to back the subpoena before he headed home for recess to face his constituents.

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It was another striking moment in what has been a wild two weeks in the House. Facing an onslaught of Epstein-related efforts by the Democrats, the Rules Committee refused to meet after Monday, as I reported, resulting in an unproductive week on the House floor and a remarkable decision from Speaker Mike Johnson to send everyone home early for the summer recess. A meeting of the House Appropriations Committee to take up the Commerce, Justice, and Science funding bill was also scuttled because Republicans feared Democrats would attach Epstein amendments.

The House Oversight Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement did meet, of course, resulting in the subpoena vote. Reps. Lauren Boebert and Paul Gosar didn’t show up for the meeting, which shrank the Republican majority from three seats to one. Meanwhile, Democratic ranking member Summer Lee had realized that the meeting’s objective of discussing a bill on child and human trafficking at the border during the Biden administration was the perfect setting to bring up Epstein, especially in light of a caucus-wide effort to force Republicans out of hiding.

As the meeting got underway, a frustrated Rep. Clay Higgins, chair of the subcommittee, told Johnson in a testy phone call, according to two people familiar with the situation, that his committee wouldn’t be able to beat back Epstein-related measures, putting members in the difficult position of having to choose between Trump and a demanding MAGA base. Higgins questioned why the committee was even gaveling in. Loudly echoing rank-and-file Republican members, he demanded to hear the speaker’s plan to address the wave of Epstein measures. Johnson didn’t have much of a strategy.

Paranoid Androids

Two other Republicans joined Jack in voting for the subpoena: South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace and Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, a Freedom Caucus member in one of the most competitive districts in the country. When Perry was later asked about Epstein at a telephone town hall last week, he declared that he’d voted for transparency. “I have requested the files,” he said, according to NPR. “I have requested that the D.O.J.—and you can see the letter publicly—that the D.O.J. release the files. Not only that, they also provide a special prosecutor.”

Rep. Andy Biggs, another Freedom Caucus member, had seemed as though he was going to back the Justice Department subpoena but waited until after the other committee members had voted, and then voted against it. One Republican insisted that Biggs will lose his bid for governor in Arizona over that vote. I’m not sure that’s true, but it shows how paranoid Republicans have become about the Epstein issue. Others think Biggs probably voted against the measure because he’s seeking Trump’s endorsement for his gubernatorial race.

In any case, it appears that Johnson’s balmy six-month honeymoon with this Congress, thanks largely to Trump’s support, is over. He’s struggling to control his conference and lacks a coherent strategy to turn the page. Of course, it doesn’t help that Trump and the White House are also floundering. As it turns out, if you build a presidential campaign around “exposing the truth,” you get penalized when you look like you’re covering it up instead.

It would be a tough position for any speaker. The Trump administration doesn’t want to be seen whipping against Epstein transparency—and they’re not, to the best of my knowledge—and so Johnson has been left to deal with his members on his own. His answer, to ring the summer recess bell early and hope this all goes away, may be wishful thinking. At the very least, members will expect a game plan to be in place before they return after Labor Day.

The Senate has been mostly inoculated from the Epstein drama—the rules are different, and it’s much harder for Democrats to box Republicans in—but pay attention to the upper chamber next week. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland had already proposed an Epstein amendment to the Senate Commerce, Justice, and Science funding bill, which was added unanimously, without a vote, because Republicans didn’t want to have to vote on it. Before the Senate heads home for its own monthlong break, Democrats are calling for votes on Epstein transparency on the Senate floor, thereby daring Republicans to block them. Trump ally Markwayne Mullin already blocked one resolution, by Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego, last week. But he arguably made things worse for his colleagues when he explained, perhaps a bit too candidly, that “what we’re simply wanting to do here is give [Trump] cover.”

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