Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, called an early recess as Democrats push for a vote to release the Epstein files. Key US politics stories from Tuesday 22 July at a glance
Mounting pressure over President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has reportedly rattled and divided Republican congress members so deeply that the House speaker called an early recess on Tuesday.
Democrats had pushed for a vote to release files related to Epstein as Trump fends off questions over his relationship with the financier, who died by suicide in his jail cell in 2019. Now the House will break up on Wednesday instead of Thursday in what Democrats say is a way to dodge the vote.
Here’s the what’s happened today:
Republicans downplayed the decision to cut short the workweek, while arguing that the White House has already moved to resolve questions about the case. Last week, Trump asked the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to release grand jury testimony, although that is expected to be only a fraction of the case’s documents.
The House speaker, Mike Johnson, dismissed the calls for a vote as “political games” and also argued that Congress must be careful in calling for the release of documents related to the case, for fear of retraumatizing his victims.
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Congress will subpoena Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned sex trafficker who was a close associate of Epstein, to testify amid a political firestorm over the Trump administration’s decision not to release its remaining Epstein files.
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Trump has claimed the future owner of the US TV network CBS will provide him with $20m worth of advertising and programming – days after the network cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The US president recently reached a $16m settlement with Paramount, the parent of CBS News, over what he claimed was misleading editing of a pre-election interview with the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris.
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The US will quit the United Nations’ culture and education agency Unesco, the US state department has said, as Donald Trump continues to pull out of international institutions. The move is a blow to the Paris-based global organization, founded after the second world war to promote peace through international cooperation in education, science and culture.
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Barack Obama has broken his silence on calls from Trump for him to be prosecuted by unequivocally rejecting his successor’s accusations that he tried to engineer a “coup” after Trump’s 2016 election victory by “manufacturing” evidence of Russian interference.
His office called the accusations “nonsense”, “misinformation”, “outrageous” and “a weak attempt at distraction”.
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Trump has announced a trade deal with Japan, potentially resolving weeks of fraught negotiations between the two allies which had caused political uproar and economic uncertainty in Tokyo. While he gave few details of the deal, he described it as “massive” in a social media post, adding that “Japan will invest, at my direction, $550 Billion Dollars into the United States.”
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Coca-Cola has announced it will launch a product made with US cane sugar this year, days after Trump claimed the company had agreed to replace high-fructose corn syrup. But the company said that the drink would be an additional product rather than a replacement for the drink containing corn syrup.
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General Motors announced that Donald Trump’s tariffs knocked $1.1bn off its operating income in its last quarter.
The New York Times defended the Wall Street Journal after the Trump administration decided to bar the outlet from the White House press pool.
Stephen Colbert declared to Donald Trump that “the gloves are off” in his first broadcast since his Late Show was cancelled amid a political firestorm.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 21 July 2025.