In the first ten days of September 2025, the House Appropriations Committee voted five separate times on forcing the Justice Department to give up what it was holding on Jeffrey Epstein.

Flight logs. Visitor records for his houses and his plane. Bank records. A full accounting of every document the department had on Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

All five failed. Ashley Hinson sits on that committee. Her name is not on any of the five roll calls.

It is on something else from those same two days, and that is the part worth sitting with.

Five votes, five absences

You don't have to take anyone's word for this. The House publishes the committee's roll calls, name by name, in the report on each bill.

On September 3, 2025, the committee marked up the Financial Services and General Government bill and took 20 recorded votes. Three were about Epstein:

• Roll Call 11 — cut off money for the White House budget office until the Epstein files are released. Failed 26–33.
• Roll Call 12 — bar public money from being used to keep back the visitor logs, flight manifests and guest records for Epstein's homes and private plane. Failed 26–34.
• Roll Call 14 — bar the Treasury Department from withholding, blacking out or slow-walking financial records on Epstein and Maxwell, including the suspicious-activity reports banks file when money looks dirty. Failed 28–33.

Hinson is listed in neither the yes column nor the no column on any of the three. You can read the full vote tables for that markup and check for yourself.

A week later, on September 10, 2025, the committee marked up the bill that funds the Justice Department itself. Nineteen recorded votes. Two were about Epstein:

• Roll Call 12 — require the attorney general to hand the committee a list of everything the Justice Department has that relates to Epstein and Maxwell. Failed 28–33.
• Roll Call 17 — bar the department from withholding, redacting or delaying the release of unclassified records in the Epstein-Maxwell case. Failed 28–34.

Same result. Hinson's name is on neither one.

Five chances to be counted. Zero appearances.

One vote each day, and neither was an Epstein vote

Here is what makes this different from an ordinary absence.

At the end of each of those two markups, the committee voted on the thing leadership actually needed: the motion to send the bill to the House floor. September 3, adopted 35–28. September 10, adopted 34–28.

Hinson is recorded on both — and on nothing else. "Mrs. Hinson" appears exactly once in each day's vote tables. She is missing from all 19 other recorded votes on September 3 and all 18 on September 10, the five Epstein amendments among them.

So this is not a member sitting out the awkward votes and staying for the rest. It is a member who cast one vote at each markup: the one her party needed her for.

The amendment nobody had to put their name on

There was a sixth Epstein measure that week, and it tells you something about how this works.

On September 10, Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez offered an amendment to hold back $35.5 million from the Justice Department until the attorney general turned over every document on the decision to move Ghislaine Maxwell out of a federal prison in Tallahassee and into a minimum-security camp in Bryan, Texas.

That move was real, and it was recent. Maxwell is serving 20 years for helping Epstein abuse girls. She was transferred to the Texas camp on August 1, 2025 — days after Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general and formerly Donald Trump's personal defense lawyer, spent two days interviewing her at a Florida courthouse.

The amendment was killed on a voice vote. No roll call. No names. Nobody on the committee had to be on the record about whether the public should learn how Maxwell got a better prison.

We're noting that because it's the one part of this story where nobody can be pinned down — including Hinson. She didn't dodge that vote. There was nothing to dodge.

Blanche is now the attorney general. The Senate confirmed him 50–49 at 4:17 in the morning on August 8, 2026. Hinson's reaction, to CBS2 in Cedar Rapids: "We need someone to have that position. I don't think leaving it unfilled was a good thing for our country. And so I'm glad the Senate was able to get him confirmed."

What came in on September 10

Federal Election Commission records are public, and they are searchable by date.

On September 10, 2025 — the day of Roll Call 12 and Roll Call 17 — Ashley for Iowa, Hinson's Senate campaign committee, recorded two contributions of $7,000 each: one from Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder of Blackstone, and one from his wife, Christine Schwarzman.

Fourteen thousand dollars, from one household, on that day.

Schwarzman's name appears in the Epstein files more than 20 times. He has never been accused of wrongdoing related to Epstein, and there is no evidence he ever emailed Epstein directly. That is worth saying plainly, because the true version of this is bad enough on its own.

The true version is this: on a day when a member of the Appropriations Committee had two recorded chances to vote for opening a set of files, and took neither, her Senate campaign banked $14,000 from a billionaire household whose name is inside them.

Nobody had to arrange that. That's the point.

We've been here before with her

This is not the first time the calendar has lined up this way.

Last month we wrote about the Daily Beast's finding that Hinson and her committees took nearly $90,000 from billionaires named in the Epstein files — about $30,500 of it during the same fall stretch when she was refusing to sign the discharge petition that would have forced the files onto the House floor. Out of 219 House Republicans, exactly four signed it. She was not one of them.

Her stated objection was not that the files should stay sealed. It was that forcing the vote would hand the floor to Democrats — a procedural complaint about her own party's convenience.

And it is not the first time she has been missing from her own committee. Congressional records show she has missed 163 committee votes and 33 floor votes since taking office in 2021 — including, in that same September 2025 stretch, three votes in one day on funding to fight violence against women.

Committee votes are the ones that almost never show up in a member's published attendance rate. That is exactly why they are worth counting.

What she did when it was free

On November 18, 2025, after Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva's signature finally forced the discharge petition over the line, the Epstein Files Transparency Act came to the House floor and passed 427 to 1. Hinson voted yes. Of the 428 members who voted, only one voted no.

By then the outcome was decided and a no vote would have been a national headline. In her own committee, two months earlier, when five votes were live and her name would have gone on the record, she wasn't there for a single one.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson sits on the House Appropriations Committee. On September 3 and September 10, 2025, that committee held five recorded votes to force the release of Epstein records — flight logs, visitor lists, bank records, and the Justice Department's full inventory. Hinson's name appears on none of them. On both days her name appears on the final vote to send the bill to the House floor — the only vote she is recorded on either day. On September 10, the day of two of those votes, her Senate campaign took $14,000 from Stephen and Christine Schwarzman; Schwarzman's name is in the Epstein files more than 20 times. She then refused to sign the petition that would have forced the files open, and voted for release two months later, when the count was 427 to 1 and her vote changed nothing.

Source

Jesse Valentine, "Hinson missed multiple votes on Epstein investigation", American Journal News, August 27, 2026. Photo: AP. The individual roll calls, vote totals and member lists in this post were independently verified against the House Appropriations Committee's published vote tables for the September 3, 2025 and September 10, 2025 markups, and the contributions against FEC records.