U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., was sworn in to office on Nov. 12, 2025, by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. (Screenshot courtesy of C-SPAN)

WASHINGTON — Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva was sworn in to office Wednesday after a delay that U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson attributed to the long government shutdown, but that critics allege was because the Arizona lawmaker pledged to be the deciding signature on a petition to release the so-called Epstein files.

Grijalva, who was elected on Sept. 23, has publicly vowed to add her name to a bipartisan measure that would force the House to vote on the release of files from the government’s investigation of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

The Trump administration said in July it would not release further information related to the case. President Donald Trump had campaigned on releasing the files.

Grijalva, Arizona’s first elected Latina, called the delayed ceremony an “abuse of power.”

“It has been 50 days since the people of Arizona’s 7th Congressional District elected me to represent them. … One individual should not be able to unilaterally obstruct the swearing-in of a duly elected member of Congress for political reasons,” said Grijalva, who filled the seat occupied by her late father, Raúl Grijalva, who died earlier this year.

“Our democracy only works when everyone has a voice. This includes the millions of people across the country who have experienced violence and exploitation, including Liz Stein and Jessica Michaels, both survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse,” Grijalva said. “They are here in the gallery with us this evening.”

To cheers from her Democratic colleagues in the chamber, Grijalva said she was going to sign the petition “right now.”  

Massie, Khanna lead petition drive

As of early September, the discharge petition, led by Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., had garnered the signatures of all Democrats and four Republicans, leaving the petition just one shy of the 218 signatures needed to bypass Johnson and force a vote on the House floor.

The three Republicans who joined Massie in signing were Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.

The petition forces to the floor, likely at some point in the next few weeks, a Massie-sponsored resolution from July compelling the Department of Justice to “disclose all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in its possession that relate to Epstein” and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted on federal sex trafficking charges.  

The resolution attracted 50 cosponsors, nearly a dozen of them Republicans.

Johnson defends delay

Grijalva and her supporters have outright accused Johnson of delaying the swearing-in because of the Epstein petition.

“When the American people vote, this chamber respects their will and seats them immediately. Politics should never come into play,” said Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., on the House floor moments before Johnson administered the oath to Grijalva.

Democrats pointed to the fact that Johnson has previously sworn in other lawmakers when the House was not in session. 

Johnson argued in mid-October that Grijalva hadn’t yet been sworn in because she won her special election after the House went home on Sept. 19, followed shortly thereafter by a government shutdown on Oct. 1.  “As soon as (Sen.) Chuck Schumer opens the government … we’ll have that as soon as we get back to business,” he said. 

At a press conference on Oct. 15, Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego accused Johnson of protecting “pedophiles, whether it’s involving Donald Trump or any of his rich, elite friends.”

Trump had a well-documented friendship with Epstein. Trump maintains he booted Epstein from his private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, because the financier had poached young female employees.

A deluge of Epstein documents

New emails revealing details about the relationship between Trump and Epstein surfaced Wednesday. Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released three exchanges with content suggesting Trump was aware of Epstein’s abuse of underage girls. 

Republican leaders on the committee soon followed by releasing more than 20,000 documents they received from the Epstein estate.

Reports also surfaced that the Trump administration had reached out to two GOP lawmakers, Boebert and Mace, about removing their names from the petition.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to confirm during Wednesday’s briefing that Trump had met with Boebert in the Situation Room, a secure center of national and global information for the president.

“I’m not going to detail conversations that took place in the Situation Room,” Leavitt said when asked about Trump approaching Boebert to remove her name.

Boebert’s office pointed States Newsroom to the lawmaker’s afternoon social media post that read,“I want to thank White House officials for meeting with me today. Together, we remain committed to ensuring transparency for the American people.”

Mace’s office did not respond to questions to confirm the White House reached out to the South Carolina lawmaker. Rather, Mace’s Communications Director Sydney Long said, “​​The Congresswoman is not removing her name from the discharge petition because of her personal story.”

Mace has publicly shared her own story of sexual assault.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany (center) at the Wisconsin State Capitol Thursday Oct 23 with Sen. John Jagler (L) and Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R). Republicans scolded State Superintendent Jill Underly for not appearing at a hearing prompted by a Cap Times investigation of teacher sexual misconduct. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the leading Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin, held a press conference on the steps of the state Capitol Thursday to declare his outrage over a Cap Times investigation that tracked more than 200 cases of alleged child sexual abuse by Wisconsin teachers and suggested a lack of accountability and transparency by the state Department of Public Instruction. 

Bolstering Tiffany’s case, State Superintendent Jill Underly decided to skip Thursday’s Senate hearing on the controversy. Instead, Underly traveled to Indiana to accept an award from her alma mater, leaving DPI staff to endure questioning by members of a state Senate committee eager to hang child sex abuse allegations around the necks of DPI, Gov. Tony Evers and other Democrats.

Recognizing an opportunity, Tiffany parachuted in to add his voice to the chorus. “You will never have to wonder if I will show up,” Tiffany declared. “I will always be there for Wisconsin and our children, even when state Democrat leaders fail to do so.” He drew a tenuous connection between the accusation that DPI has provided insufficient oversight of predatory teachers to bashing the state agency for “lower standards” in schools and for embracing diversity, equity and inclusion. ”DPI spent two hours a week creating a DEI plan, but couldn’t find the time to investigate these cases,” Tiffany declared. He promised that if he’s elected governor he will ensure proper misconduct investigations of teachers and create a public dashboard showing why they lost their licenses, “most of all,” he added, “we’re going to educate kids, not indoctrinate.” 

As soon as Tiffany finished converting the story about abuse by teachers into red meat for his campaign, state Democrats jumped into the mosh pit, accusing him of hypocrisy because he voted against releasing the Epstein files. 

None of this mud-slinging sheds any light on what’s happening to kids in Wisconsin schools or how the state can better protect them.

Several of my daughters’ friends at Madison East High School were targeted by David Krutchen, a popular teacher who had close relationships with many of his students and who, it turned out, spent years spying on girls during overnight field trips, placing hidden cameras in hotel bathrooms and bedrooms. The Krutchen case took a heavy toll on those kids and their families. It was a shocking, disgusting betrayal of the students by a trusted adult. For years the court hearings dragged on, and traumatized students had to keep showing up to testify. Finally, Krutchen went to prison.

According to the Cap Times story, which includes interviews with some of Krutchen’s victims, DPI “shielded” more than 200 cases of teacher sexual misconduct from the public. That frame could lead you to believe that DPI was protecting pedophile teachers the same way the Catholic Church spent years shuffling pedophile priests around to avoid accountability and bad press. But that’s not the impression I got from DPI’s testimony. In a video Underly posted on Facebook, and in her deputies’ testimony to legislators, the agency insisted that allowing teachers to voluntarily give up their licenses is not a “loophole” to end embarrassing investigations but ensures teachers who face misconduct charges are entered into a national database that can be accessed by other state education departments.

The Cap Times story, aided by a successful open records request, does give the sense that DPI has a slipshod system for keeping track of misconduct investigations, with just two staff people in charge of hundreds of cases, information stored on a Google spreadsheet, and 20% of cases where it’s unclear what type of misconduct was investigated. 

In its defense, DPI points out that the Legislature cut the agency’s budget by millions of dollars and they are doing their best. That point would have sounded better coming from Underly herself, instead of her deputies who had to fill in because she couldn’t bother to appear in person to demonstrate she actually cares about these horrible cases. 

Underly’s failure to show up and address the repercussions of the story is inexcusable. As the top educator in the state, she needs to reassure students and their parents that she cares about them and is on their side.

But the Republicans rushing to connect Underly’s weak leadership to all of their talking points about schools are equally unhelpful.

Ever since former Gov. Scott Walker began heaping scorn on teachers, painting them as lazy, overpaid and incompetent while ramming through his explosively controversial union-busting Act 10 law, the GOP has weaponized divisive distrust of teachers and public schools. Aided by a powerful private school choice lobby, they’ve hammered away on the idea that private schools are better and siphoned millions of dollars in taxpayer support for public education out of public classrooms and into the private sphere.

“We are going to make sure that Wisconsin goes back to the top of the game,” Tiffany declared Thursday, adding, “We are behind Mississippi in educational attainment. Less than one in three kids can read at grade level in the fourth grade in the state of Wisconsin. Is that not a disaster? That will not be the case if I’m elected as governor, we will have accountability and we will have higher standards.”

But the defunding of Wisconsin public schools that began under Walker and continues today is directly tied to the decline in quality. It’s not laziness or pedophilia that plague our school system. It’s deliberate neglect.

Republican calls for “higher standards” and “accountability” have, over the past two decades, been accompanied by disinvestment and the steady expansion of a publicly funded private voucher school system.

Ironically, the private schools Republicans champion in the school choice program have no teacher licensing requirements and DPI has no way to oversee or investigate their employees. Nor are private schools subject to Wisconsin’s open records laws. We will never get to see how they handle cases of employee misconduct.

There’s a reason it’s a big story when adults abuse the trust of children. It’s despicable behavior. Politicians who ignore or capitalize on that crime for political gain do us no good.