For two months in the fall of 2025, a piece of paper sat in the U.S. House waiting for one more name.

It was a discharge petition — a tool that lets rank-and-file members go around their own leadership and force a vote. This one would force the Justice Department to hand over its Epstein files. It needed 218 signatures. It had 217.

Ashley Hinson would not be the 218th.

Now the Daily Beast reports something else that was happening during those same weeks: Hinson and her PACs took nearly $90,000 from billionaires whose names appear in the Epstein files, according to Federal Election Commission records. About $30,500 of it came in during the stretch when she was helping keep those files sealed.

Four Republicans signed. She wasn't one of them.

You don't have to take anyone's word for who signed. The House Clerk publishes the list. Go look at Discharge Petition No. 9, filed by Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie on September 2, 2025.

Out of 219 House Republicans, exactly four put their names on it: Massie, Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. That's it. Everyone else, including Hinson, stayed off.

Hinson had already explained why. On a weekly press call in July 2025, she said Massie "is approaching this in the wrong way, and he's doing it in a way that we give the floor to Democrats, which is not how we should be doing business."

Read that again. Her objection wasn't that the files should stay secret. Her objection was that releasing them would be a bad look for her party.

She added that she trusted the administration to handle it: "I do trust President Trump here and (Attorney General) Pam Bondi to do the right thing, and (FBI Director) Kash Patel to do the right thing at the FBI."

That trust had already been tested. That same month, the Justice Department put out a memo saying there was no Epstein "client list" and that it would release nothing further. When the files finally did come out, they were full of names — including names of people who fund Ashley Hinson's campaigns.

The petition only got its 218th signature on November 12, 2025, when Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in and signed it on the House floor. Not because Hinson changed her mind.

Who was writing the checks

Here's who gave, and how often their names show up in the files:

• Stephen Schwarzman, the Blackstone co-founder worth more than $42 billion. He gave Hinson $26,500 across her campaigns and PACs — including $7,000 on September 10, 2025, days after Massie filed the petition. Schwarzman's name appears in the files 23 times, including an email where Epstein called him "terrific." Schwarzman never emailed Epstein directly and faces no accusations of wrongdoing.
• Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management, worth more than $7 billion. He gave $7,000 on September 25, 2025 — while the petition was still stuck at 217. His name appears 389 times, and he kept a documented relationship with Epstein long after Epstein's 2008 sex-crime conviction.
• Howard Lutnick, now Trump's Commerce Secretary. He gave Hinson's House campaigns more than $12,000 in 2021 and 2023. His name appears at least 141 times, and there is a photograph of him with Epstein on Epstein's private island in 2012 — seven years after Lutnick has said he cut off all contact. Lutnick testified before the House Oversight Committee about his ties to Epstein and denied any wrongdoing.

Others on the donor list named in the files include billionaires Henry Kravis (55 mentions), John Catsimatidis (70 mentions, plus a spot in Epstein's "little black book"), and Howard Lorber. None of those three corresponded with Epstein in the files, and none of them face accusations of misconduct.

That's worth saying plainly, because the accurate version of this story is bad enough without stretching it.

Then she voted yes — after it stopped mattering

Once Grijalva's signature broke the logjam, the vote couldn't be stopped. It came to the floor on November 18, 2025.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed 427 to 1. Hinson voted Aye. So did nearly every member of the House — you can look up her name in the roll call yourself.

Iowa's three other House Republicans did the same thing: Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn, and Randy Feenstra all refused to sign the petition, then all voted for the bill once refusing was no longer an option.

That's the tell. When her signature could have actually forced the files open, she withheld it. When the outcome was already decided and a "no" vote would have been a headline, she voted yes.

You don't get credit for jumping on a train that's already left the station.

This fits the pattern

Blackstone was already on Hinson's list of top donors before any of this — it's right there in her OpenSecrets contributor profile, alongside Koch Industries, Valero Energy, and Comcast. She sits on the House Appropriations Committee, the panel that decides where federal money goes. That makes her worth a lot to people with money.

And she has been clear about who she's going to Washington for. When she launched her Senate campaign, she said she wants to be "President Trump's top ally in the United States Senate." Not Iowa's top ally.

Iowa Democratic Party spokesperson Drew Myers put it this way to the Daily Beast:

"She's firmly on the side of the Epstein class and fought harder to prevent the release of the Epstein files than she has for the Iowans who are struggling from rising prices at the gas pump and grocery store."

Nobody has to say anything out loud

Let's be careful about what this is and isn't.

There is no evidence anyone paid Ashley Hinson to keep her name off that petition. Billionaires like Schwarzman and Kravis write checks to Republicans up and down the ballot. This is just what their giving calendar looks like.

The problem isn't a bribe. The problem is that a system like this doesn't need one.

A congresswoman refuses to sign the petition that would open a set of records. Some of the wealthiest people named in those records fund her campaign. Nobody has to make a phone call. Nobody has to make an offer. The money and the incentives do all the talking, right out in the open, on public forms anybody can read.

Hinson is now asking Iowans to promote her to the U.S. Senate. She's running against Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek in a race the Daily Beast describes as tight.

Before Iowans vote, it's fair to ask a simple question: when Ashley Hinson had one chance to do something that would have cost her donors and helped Epstein's victims, which way did she go?

She had two months to decide. She chose the checks.

We deserve better.

Source

Vic Verbalaitis, "Exclusive: Iowa GOP Senate Candidate Ashley Hinson Faces Fresh Heat Over Epstein Pen Pal Campaign Donor Cash", The Daily Beast, July 30, 2026. Photo illustration by The Daily Beast. Signature list and roll call independently verified against the House Clerk's discharge petition record and Roll Call 289.