Republican Rep. Clay Higgins of Lafayette, the only House lawmaker who voted against releasing documents associated with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Tuesday, said the legislation will hurt people who are named in the documents but did nothing wrong.
“It abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure in America. As written, this bill reveals and injures thousands of innocent people — witnesses, people who provided alibis, family members, etc,” Higgins wrote on X after the vote.
The bipartisan bill passed the House in a 427 to 1 vote. It now moves to the Senate for consideration.
President Trump, who had tried to head off the House vote until bowing to pressure from his own party, has indicated he will sign the legislation.
Higgins, a Trump loyalist who said last week that he planned to vote against the bill, added that the process of releasing the documents is moving properly through the House Oversight Committee.
“The Oversight Committee is conducting a thorough investigation that has already released well over 60,000 pages of documents from the Epstein case,” he wrote on X. “That effort will continue in a manner that provides all due protections for innocent Americans.”
Higgins said if the bill is amended in the Senate to “properly address privacy of victims and other Americans, who are named but not criminally implicated,” he would vote for it when it returned to the House.
Senate GOP leader John Thune has said changes to the bill are unlikely.
