As a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX) has some background with the purported files of the late Jeffrey Epstein and wants to see them released to the public, once the identities of his victims are protected.
As the father of three young children and a former U.S. Army Apache helicopter pilot, Hunt was more blunt: “If anybody harmed my children in that manner, I would rip out their thorax and feed it to them.”
Hunt, in his second congressional term, was commenting on pending testimony of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former associate and sometime girlfriend who is currently in prison for her role in trafficking underage girls for Epstein. While Congress is now in its summer recess, Rep. James Comer’s House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed her to testify and expects to do so within the next week.
Hunt spoke to Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers, hosts of The Drill Down, on the whirlwind of the past six months in Congress since President Donald Trump took office. The question of publishing the Epstein files was, for him, just the final coda on the session.
“I think we’re going to get to the bottom of some of the weird stuff that went on, but a lot of this weird cabal, it’s the left. It’s actually Hollywood CEOs that they have been hiding this for,” he told Schweizer and Eggers.
“And I find it funny that, while we’re talking about Epstein right now, what about the previous four years under Biden? Nothing. What about Obama? Nothing… For those that think that President Trump was on that flight or on Epstein Island, let me tell you, we would already know about it,” he said. “We would have known about it before the first time that he ran.”
Noting the frenzy among some on the left over this issue, Schweizer said, “One of Trump’s great gifts is his ability to bring out the worst in his opponents.”
Hunt’s interview with Schweizer touched on many of the issues Congress dealt with during its first six months, including a provision in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that would prevent illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid funds and a Supreme Court challenge to Trump’s executive order redefining birthright citizenship.
While the court action awaits, though, Schweizer asks: “Is there anything that Congress can do?”
Hunt believes the bill’s restrictions on Medicaid to illegal immigrants answers that. He sees those questions in personal terms.
“My great-great-grandfather was a slave… born on Rosedown Plantation about 30 miles north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” he said. “But when you think about the slaves in my background, this is why birthright citizenship was created – for them. And then you think about people that are coming into this country, having children, and then they get the same rights as those whose families worked the land in this country as slaves, getting the exact same rights? I can assure you that is not what the founding fathers intended.”
“We strengthened Medicaid by requiring it is reserved for American citizens only,” he said. “I did not fight for this country to put Americans second,” said Hunt, who served in Iraq.
Eggers notes that an estimate that “$4.2 billion worth of food stamps funds have gone to non-citizens.”
Hunt represents a district in suburban Houston and does not plan to stay in office long term. “My generation doesn’t do anything for long,” he joked, adding that he views his time in DC as helping to build a generational, “cultural bridge” between older members of Congress and Millennials like himself.
A West Point graduate with two master’s degrees, Hunt has been mentioned as a possible candidate to join the Trump administration in some capacity and told the hosts he would be thrilled to do so if asked. He’s pleased with the way Trump’s administration has done things thus far.
“People are happy with what we’re seeing,” he said. He applauded Trump for moving swiftly in the early days to enact his agenda. “He already knows where the bathrooms are and where the skeletons are.”
For more from Peter Schweizer, subscribe to The DrillDown podcast.
