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An unlikely duo of lawmakers partnered with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims to force the release of millions of documents, Sarah Fitzpatrick reports. In an account drawn from interviews with more than 40 people, she explores the campaign—and what it hopes to accomplish. “I have been reporting on Epstein—his criminal investigations, his network of powerful friends, and his hundreds, possibly thousands, of young victims—for almost a decade,” Fitzpatrick writes. “I’ve chronicled the many false starts and dashed hopes for accountability following Epstein’s second arrest in July 2019, his death while in custody, and the efforts to bring others in his network to justice. I have spent years trying to figure out what, if anything, Donald Trump knew about Epstein’s abuse of young women, and whether the president was at all involved. On this question and many others, I was repeatedly told: ‘The story is over.’ “But over the past several months, something extraordinary has happened,” she continues: Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California “partnered with a group of Epstein survivors and a few female Republican lawmakers to successfully push for legislation mandating the release of the so-called Epstein files. It was the most significant act of defiance by Republicans in Congress against the president in his second term, and it transformed what had been treated as a fringe conspiracy theory into a populist rallying cry.” The volume of records collected over several decades—“and the hundreds if not thousands of people who may have information about Epstein and his criminal enterprise but have not been questioned by law enforcement—is both mind-boggling and tragic,” Fitzpatrick writes at the link in our bio. “But Justice Department officials have suggested that they are done investigating Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators and have no plans to pursue additional federal charges. That stance—coupled with the department’s extensive and inconsistent redactions in the documents—has prompted even more suspicion. And no one faces more insistent questions about what he might be trying to hide than the president.” 🎨 : The Atlantic. Illustration sources: Nathan Posner / Anadolu / Getty; Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call / Getty; Jon Elswick / AP.