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Demand Progress Condemns Speaker Johnson’s New Epstein Coverup
Epstein Victims Speak Out, Demand Progress Drives 200k+ Petition Signers & Calls Asking Congress to Release the Epstein Files
On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) scheduled a vote on yet another sham Epstein resolution designed to distract from Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) and Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-CA) bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act. Johnson’s sham vote follows Massie and Khanna’s announcement that they have the 218 votes necessary to force a House vote on their resolution, which would lead to the responsible and careful release of the federal government’s files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
Demand Progress announced today that more than 200,000 voters have signed a petition and more than 2,000 have made calls asking members of Congress to support the Massie/Khanna bill. Reps. Massie and Khanna are also preparing to hold a press conference on Wednesday, Sept. 3 at 10:30 AM ET with victims of Jeffrey Epstein.
- Watch Epstein’s Victims Speak Out Tuesday @ 10:30 AM ET
- Read Demand Progress’s Epstein Memo
- Visit Releasethefiles.org
The following is a statement from Demand Progress Policy Director Emily Peterson-Cassin:
“Speaker Johnson keeps trying to do everything he can to keep the Epstein files under wraps. His latest phony resolution will only help House members look like they’re doing something without actually releasing the files. Real people were trafficked and harmed by Jeffrey Epstein, who also was close friends with the sitting president and many of the richest and most powerful people on earth. The American people deserve to know what the government knows about these crimes and the responsible way to accomplish that is by supporting the Massie-Khanna effort to release the files.”
Demand Progress amplifies the voice of the people -- and wields it to make government accountable and contest concentrated corporate power. Our mission is to protect the democratic character of the internet -- and wield it to contest concentrated corporate power and hold government accountable.
LATEST NEWS
'Cruel': Trump Moves to End TPS for Quarter of a Million Venezuelans
"For the last four years, they've been working legally and paying taxes like everyone else," said one advocate. "Now Trump's going to kick them all out."
Sep 04, 2025
As tensions between the US and Venezuela were inflamed Wednesday by the Trump administration's deadly attack on a boat off the coast of the South American country, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was ending legal protections for more than a quarter of a million Venezuelans who President Donald Trump had previously shielded from deportation.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) declared that allowing Venezuelan nationals to remain in the US with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was "not in America's best interests," but the move was swiftly denounced as both cruel and misguided by critics.
The administration had weighed "public safety, national security, migration factors, immigration policy, economic considerations, and foreign policy," spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said, and urged Venezuelan migrants to "self-deport." USCIS also said that "conditions in Venezuela no longer meet the TPS statutory requirements."
More than 250,000 Venezuelans who were granted TPS in 2021 have faced a September 10 expiration date on their status, but the Trump administration had the option to renew their status.
The migrants are not part of a separate group of 350,000 Venezuelans whose TPS status the Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to revoke in May; those migrants were granted the protections by the Biden administration in 2023.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro declared an "economic emergency" in April, attributing the country's financial struggles to Trump's tariffs. The country has also faced years of economic mismanagement and US sanctions, exacerbating the crisis, and Maduro's government has repressed protests against his controversial reelection in 2024. The UN special rapporteur on the right to food said after a visit to the country earlier this year that nearly 82% of people in Venezuela were living in poverty and more than half had insufficient income to purchase a basic food basket.
Critics on Wednesday noted that the US State Department continues to advise Americans not to travel to Venezuela, saying there is a "high risk of wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure."
While Venezuelans "are going hungry and without food and medicine," said US Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.), "the Trump Admin. is stripping TPS for Venezuelans in the US and is claiming that conditions in Venezuela are not that bad."
Andrea Flores, vice president of immigration policy and campaigns at FWD.us, said USCIS did not make clear "how ending TPS for Venezuelans is in the best interest of the United States."
"Not only is this a mass de-legalization effort, it pushes hundreds of thousands of people out of the workforce," said Flores. "The economic consequences of the shrinking workforce impacts all of us."
Since taking office, Trump has designated the Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization and has claimed it coordinates with the Maduro government—an assessment rejected by US intelligence agencies. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested about 8,000 Venezuelans in the first half of 2025, and the administration has used the Alien Enemies Act—previously only used in wartime—to expel hundreds of Venezuelans from the US. On Wednesday, a federal court ruled that Trump had illegally invoked the law.
The administration has claimed it is rounding up criminals, but an analysis in June by the libertarian Cato Institute found that 65% of people arrested by ICE had no criminal conviction, and 93% were not convicted for violent crimes.
The administration has also deployed several warships off the coast of Venezuela as he's threatened military force against drug cartels in the country, despite the lack of evidence that cartel activity takes place there. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, just 2% of all cocaine seized by the agency is in Venezuela.
On Wednesday, the administration drew outrage from human rights advocates as it announced it had attacked a boat that it claimed was transporting cocaine and linked to Tren de Aragua, killing 11 people.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, emphasized that the TPS beneficiaries who are now being ordered to "self-deport" or face expulsion "were previously granted deportation protections by Trump himself."
"Every person under this protection has been vetted at least twice," he said. "Anyone with any serious offense on their record is ineligible for protections. For the last four years, they've been working legally and paying taxes like everyone else. Now Trump's going to kick them all out."
"This is a quarter million people whose lives are about to be completely upended," he added, "for nothing but politics."
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Experts Decry US 'Summary Execution' of Alleged Drug Runners Off Venezuelan Coast
"Drug trafficking is a crime, not an act of war," noted one critic. "Traffickers must be arrested, not summarily executed."
Sep 03, 2025
Legal and human rights experts said that Tuesday's deadly US attack on a boat the Trump administration claimed was transporting cocaine off the coast of Venezuela violated international law.
"Drug trafficking is a crime, not an act of war," former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth said on social media following the strike, which US President Donald Trump said killed 11 people. "Traffickers must be arrested, not summarily executed, which US forces just illegally did."
"Trump admits he ordered a summary execution—the crime of murder," Roth added. "Drug traffickers are not combatants who can be shot on sight. They are criminal suspects who must be arrested and prosecuted."
Declassified video showing the U.S. committing a war crime when it fired on a civilian vessel near Venezuela.Being suspected of carrying drugs does not carry a death sentence and certainly not without due process.
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— Arturo Dominguez 🇨🇺🇺🇸 (@extremearturo.bsky.social) September 2, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Michael Becker, an associate professor of international law at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland, told the BBC Wednesday that the Trump administration's designation of the Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua and other drug trafficking groups as terrorist organizations "stretches the meaning of the term beyond its breaking point."
"The fact that US officials describe the individuals killed by the US strike as narcoterrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets," Becker said. "The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or the Tren de Aragua criminal organization."
"Not only does the strike appear to have violated the prohibition on the use of force, it also runs afoul of the right to life under international human rights law," Becker added.
Although the United States is not a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, US military legal advisers have asserted that the country should "act in a manner consistent with its provisions."
Luke Moffett, a professor of international law at Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told the BBC that while "force can be used to stop a boat," this should generally be accomplished using "nonlethal measures."
Such action, said Moffett, must be "reasonable and necessary in self-defense where there is immediate threat of serious injury or loss of life to enforcement officials," and the US attack was likely "unlawful under the law of the sea."
"It reflects the worst of US militarism—secretive, unilateral, and contemptuous of due process, human rights, and the rule of law."
The peace group CodePink said Wednesday that "even if Washington's claims are accurate, drug trafficking does not justify a death sentence delivered by missile."
"International law is clear: The use of force is only lawful in self-defense or with explicit UN Security Council authorization," the group continued. "This strike had neither. It reflects the worst of US militarism—secretive, unilateral, and contemptuous of due process, human rights, and the rule of law."
"Under US law, it's equally indefensible," CodePink argued. "The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to authorize war. Unilateral action may only be used in emergencies or self-defense, and this strike meets neither."
CodePink continued:
With the US Southern Command assets already deployed in the region, why blow up a vessel instead of capturing and interrogating the crew? If the goal were really to uncover evidence of [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro's alleged involvement, this reckless approach raises only two possibilities: Either the narrative is fabricated and Washington used it as a pretext for a deadly show of force or it's real, and the US chose extrajudicial killing over law, evidence, and humanity.
CodePink called on Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) "to lead the fight in Congress to stop this escalation," urging him to "introduce legislation to block unauthorized military force, hold hearings to expose the dangers of border militarization, insist on transparency of all relevant directives, and rally Congress to cut off funding for these reckless operations."
Tuesday's attack came amid Trump's deployment of an armada of naval warships off the coast of Venezuela, whose socialist government has long endured US threats of regime change—and sometimes more.
Infused with the notion that it has the right to meddle anywhere in the hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine, the US has attacked, invaded, occupied, and otherwise intervened in Latin American and Caribbean nations well over 100 times since the dubious declaration was issued by President James Monroe in 1823.
Since the late 19th century, oil-rich Venezuela has seen US interventions including involvement in border disputes, help with military coups, support for dictators, and attempts to subvert the Bolivarian Revolution—including by officially recognizing opposition figures claiming to be the legitimate presidents of the country.
Critics of US imperialism highlighted Washington's hypocritical policies and practices toward Venezuela.
"Venezuela produces no cocaine, but US warships patrol its coastline under the banner of a 'drug war,'" New Hampshire Peace Action organizing director Michael "Lefty" Morrill wrote Wednesday.
Meanwhile, neighboring Colombia and nearby Peru—the world's two leading cocaine producers—get no such treatment. Nor does Ecuador, which has emerged as one of the world's leading trafficking hubs.
Morrill also briefly explored bits of the long US history of supporting narcotraffickers when strategically expedient, noting that former Panamanian President Manuel Noriega "was first a CIA asset, then branded a narco-dictator and dragged to a US prison."
"The Taliban was once a strategic partner in Afghanistan's opium trade, before being cast as the world's largest trafficker," he added. "'Drugs' are not simply powders; they are pretexts, shaped to fit the contours of empire."
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Blocking Trump's Harvard Funding Freeze, Judge Says Courts Must Safeguard Freedom of Speech
"We must fight against antisemitism, but we equally need to protect our rights, including our right to free speech, and neither goal should nor needs to be sacrificed on the altar of the other," said Judge Allison Burroughs.
Sep 03, 2025
A Boston-based US district judge on Wednesday ruled against President Donald Trump's funding attack on Harvard University, which froze more than $2 billion in federal grants to the Ivy League institution.
When Harvard sued over the freeze in April, the university's president, Alan Garber, directly addressed the Trump administration's claims that it was responding to the school's handling of discrimination against Jewish people. Garber said that "as a Jew and as an American, I know very well that there are valid concerns about rising antisemitism," and pledged to "fight hate with the urgency it demands as we fully comply with our obligations under the law."
US District Judge Allison Burroughs, who is also Jewish, wrote in her 84-page opinion on Wednesday that "as pertains to this case, it is important to recognize and remember that if speech can be curtailed in the name of the Jewish people today, then just as easily the speech of the Jews (and anyone else) can be curtailed when the political winds change direction."
"Defendants and the president are right to combat antisemitism and to use all lawful means to do so. Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did," wrote Burroughs, an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama. "The record here, however, does not reflect that fighting antisemitism was defendants' true aim in acting against Harvard and, even if it were, combating antisemitism cannot be accomplished on the back of the First Amendment."
"We must fight against antisemitism, but we equally need to protect our rights, including our right to free speech, and neither goal should nor needs to be sacrificed on the altar of the other," she asserted. "Harvard is currently, even if belatedly, taking steps it needs to take to combat antisemitism and seems willing to do even more if need be."
The judge concluded that "now it is the job of the courts to similarly step up, to act to safeguard academic freedom and freedom of speech as required by the Constitution, and to ensure that important research is not improperly subjected to arbitrary and procedurally infirm grant terminations, even if doing so risks the wrath of a government committed to its agenda no matter the cost."
Stand up to the bully. Do not surrender in advance:Judge rules Trump administration cannot withhold funding from Harvard www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...
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— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Burroughs is the same judge who previously ruled against the Trump administration's ban on international students at Harvard. As Harvard begins a new academic year, Abdullah Shahid Sial, a junior who is co-president of the undergraduate student body, told CNN this week that "I do think there's a big, big spike in how much people feel scared."
In a statement to Reuters on Wednesday, White House spokesperson Liz Huston called Burroughs an "activist Obama-appointed judge" and said that Harvard "does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars and remains ineligible for grants in the future."
"We will immediately move to appeal this egregious decision, and we are confident we will ultimately prevail in our efforts to hold Harvard accountable," she added.
The latest court decision comes after The New York Times reported in July that Harvard was open to spending hundreds of millions of dollars to settle its battle with the administration—as other schools have—but also aimed to protect its independence.
As the newspaper noted Wednesday:
Although the university and the administration have continued to move toward a potential agreement, they have not reached a settlement. President Trump, who has taken a special interest in the financial terms of pacts his administration has reached with universities, said last week that he wanted "nothing less than $500 million from Harvard."
"They've been very bad," Mr. Trump told the education secretary, Linda McMahon, during a televised Cabinet meeting. "Don't negotiate."
The Times added that "Harvard officials had anticipated that a favorable decision from the judge could help the university's approach to the negotiations" by boosting pressure on the government not to keep fighting until they reach the US Supreme Court and allowing the school to present any deal as a win against the Trump administration.
This article has been updated with a statement from the White House.
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