The Trump administration dispatched Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel to hold a clandestine Situation Room meeting Wednesday with Rep. Lauren Boebert in an effort to convince her to remove her name from a petition forcing the release of Jeffrey Epstein investigative files.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the meeting, asking reporters, "Doesn't that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns?" when questioned about why administration officials were attempting to flip Boebert's vote on the discharge petition.
The administration's commitment to transparency intensified after House Democrats released emails Wednesday morning in which Epstein wrote that a victim "spent hours at my house" with Trump and explicitly stated Trump "knew about the girls." Nothing says "we have nothing to hide" quite like mobilizing the nation's top law enforcement officials to prevent information from becoming public.
Boebert is one of four Republicans who signed the bipartisan discharge petition alongside Reps. Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace, and Marjorie Taylor Greene to force a vote on releasing the Justice Department's Epstein files. The 218th signature arrived Wednesday when newly sworn-in Rep. Adelita Grijalva added her name, triggering the procedural mechanism.
Trump personally called Boebert in what The New York Times described as a "very early wakeup call" and attempted to reach Rep. Nancy Mace through phone tag, demonstrating that transparency sometimes requires waking people up before dawn to discuss suppression strategies.
After the meeting, Boebert stated she felt no pressure and praised the administration, saying "I love the White House. Adults are allowed to have conversations." She kept her name on the petition, though sources confirmed the meeting's primary purpose was convincing her to remove it.
The Republican Party's principled stance on the matter was clarified when Trump posted on Truth Social that "Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap," referring to members of his own party who support releasing information about a convicted sex trafficker's relationships with powerful people.
Speaker Mike Johnson has urged his conference to stay clear of the petition, explaining that the Oversight Committee's investigation will ultimately yield more information—just not information the public can actually see.
When asked why the administration was working so hard to prevent the release of files that would supposedly exonerate the president, Leavitt noted that officials were merely "briefing" Boebert, a characterization that experts say is technically accurate if you define "briefing" as "desperately attempting to change someone's vote on transparency."
