Clay Higgins Epstein Files Louisiana

427 to 1: Clay Higgins Was the Only Person in Congress Who Voted to Keep the Epstein Files Secret

He said the bill would injure innocent people. The bill already lets the attorney general redact victims' personal information, child abuse material, and anything touching an ongoing case. Higgins chairs the subcommittee that subpoenaed those same files.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 09, 2026

427 to 1: Clay Higgins Was the Only Person in Congress Who Voted to Keep the Epstein Files Secret

On November 18, 2025, the U.S. House voted on whether to make the Justice Department release its files on Jeffrey Epstein.

The vote was 427 to 1.

Clay Higgins was the one.

Not one of nine. Not one of a bloc. Out of 428 members who cast a vote — every Democrat, every other Republican, the whole ideological range of the House of Representatives — exactly one person voted no, and he represents Louisiana's 3rd District.

You can look it up yourself in the official roll call.

What he said

Higgins didn't hide from it. He put out an explanation the same day:

"I have been a principled 'NO' on this bill from the beginning. What was wrong with the bill three months ago is still wrong today."

His objection was about innocent people getting swept up:

"As written, this bill reveals and injures thousands of innocent people — witnesses, people who provided alibis, family members, etc. If enacted in its current form, this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt."

That is a real concern in the abstract. Investigative files do contain people who did nothing wrong.

It is also a concern the bill already answered.

What the bill actually says

Read the protections in the Epstein Files Transparency Act, as CBS News laid them out. The law lets the attorney general withhold or redact:

documents containing "personally identifiable information of victims or victims' personal and medical files," where release would be "a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy"
child sexual abuse material
anything that would interfere with an ongoing criminal case
classified national security information

And any redaction has to be explained to Congress.

So the bill is not a dump. It hands the attorney general — appointed by the president Higgins supports — the authority to black out exactly the category of material he says he was worried about, and then requires her to justify it.

Higgins said he'd back the bill if the Senate amended it to "properly address the privacy of victims and other Americans, who are named but not criminally implicated." The provisions above were already in the text he voted against.

He titled his own press release "Higgins Casts Vote to Protect Epstein Victims"

That's the actual headline on his official House page from November 19, 2025.

A vote against releasing the Epstein files, announced as a vote to protect the victims of Jeffrey Epstein.

The bill he voted against is the one with the victim-privacy redactions written into it.

The part that makes it strange

Here is what doesn't fit the "protect the innocent" story.

Higgins chairs the House Oversight Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement — and, as the Associated Press noted, that is the subcommittee that initiated the subpoena on the Justice Department for the Epstein files in the first place.

He used his gavel to demand the documents. Then he cast the only vote in the entire House against a law requiring the department to hand them over.

His stated alternative was that the Oversight Committee's own investigation had already produced more than 60,000 pages and would keep going, with proper protections. But that's a committee process the majority controls, releasing what it chooses when it chooses. The bill would have made release a legal obligation with a deadline, subject to redactions the attorney general has to defend.

One of those two things can be quietly slowed down. It isn't the statute.

Who this protected

Strip away the procedure and ask who benefits from an Epstein file that stays closed.

Not witnesses, whose personal information the bill already lets the government redact. Not victims, whose files the attorney general can withhold outright. The people who benefit from a sealed investigative file on a convicted sex trafficker of minors are the powerful people whose names appear in it and who were never charged.

The House understood that, which is why the count was 427 to 1.

It's worth remembering how the bill even reached the floor. It didn't get there through the normal committee process — the Rules Committee voted twice to keep it off the floor, and it took a discharge petition, signed by a majority of members going over the committee's head, to force the vote. By the time it happened, the outcome wasn't in doubt. Every Republican in the chamber could see it passing.

Higgins voted no anyway. Give him this much: he didn't take the free yes.

The record he's built

This is a member who pushed a debunked conspiracy theory at the FBI director about "ghost buses" of FBI informants on January 6 — and cut him off when Wray answered with "an emphatic no." Who posted, then deleted, a tweet mocking the hammer attack on 82-year-old Paul Pelosi. Who wrote of Haitian immigrants that they were "wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere," and, asked about it on CNN, said: "It's all true."

Louisiana's 3rd District sent him to Washington nine years ago. On the single clearest transparency vote of this Congress, he stood alone against the other 427.

We deserve better.