Chuck Schumer, a man who’s been a lawmaker longer than most Americans have been alive, is digging deep into the past to come up with new ways to pressure President Donald Trump.
The Senate minority leader, a creature of Congress since his election to the House in 1980, announced Thursday that he is invoking a law nearly a century old to compel the release of information about the late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.
And, he promises, it’s not a gimmick to just to get publicity. But it smacks of desperation.
BREAKING: Sen. Chuck Schumer invokes century-old law called “Rule of Five” to FORCE the DOJ to release ALL documents related to Jeffery Epstein.
“When any five senators on the Homeland Security Committee call on the executive branch, the executive branch must comply.” pic.twitter.com/FlaA5SgQcK
— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) July 30, 2025
At a news conference, Schumer cited what he called the “Rule of Five,” shorthand for 5 U.S. Code 2954, a law from 1928 that holds that an agency of the executive branch must comply with any request for information that comes from five members of the Senate Committee on Government Affairs.
(That committee is now known as the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.)
Schumer described the law as “little known,” and for good reason. It has been used only sparingly by members of both parties, and has been the subject of court battles on the grounds of separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches.
The last time it was used was by Democrats ginning up controversy over the conversion of the Old Post Office Building in Washington, D.C., into the now-former Trump International Hotel. (Readers might remember that was part of the spaghetti Democrats threw against the wall during Trump 1.0, hoping something would stick.)
Do you think Chuck Schumer is a fraud?
By the time that case had worked its way to the Supreme Court, it was 2023, according to CBS News, and Democrats were backing away. In one of the ironies of legal history, it was the Biden administration’s Justice Department, in the form of Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, that was arguing the law was a violation of the separation of powers.
The court’s dismissal came without comment.
What makes Thursday’s ploy so obvious is that Schumer has spent literally his entire professional life in government. And for the past 45 years, he’s been bottom-feeding inside the Beltway — first in the House, now in the Senate. (To put that in perspective, the median age of Americans is only 39, according to the United States Census).
With that kind of background, it’s a pretty good chance he’s well aware that the law he’s invoking is so sketchy the Biden administration couldn’t stand its infringement on executive powers — even when it was targeting Trump and his first administration.
But that’s not stopping Schumer from invoking it for the Epstein case, in a move unlikely to do anything but generate headlines with the words “Trump” and “Epstein” in them, and in a light that makes it sound like the administration is stonewalling those oh-so-good-faith Democrats in their oh-so-good-faith attempts to just get at the truth.
He’s clearly betting on help from his allies in the establishment media not to remind Americans that his party had four years in power while Biden was in the White House to find out anything it wanted to about Epstein. He’s hoping Americans don’t remember that the name of the Senate majority leader for all four years of the Biden administration was … Chuck Schumer.
Because — scout’s honor — Democrats are aflame with righteous indignation about Epstein associates.
To be fair, like the blind squirrel and the acorn, Schumer did make some solid points in his news conference. Trump and his team have badly bungled the PR surrounding the Epstein case.
But Schumer gave the game away when he preemptively denied that there was anything behind his move other than an honest-to-God determination to simply find the truth. And he then threw in a deadline he knows with absolute certainty is absolutely meaningless to the Trump administration.
“It’s not a stunt. It’s not symbolic,” Schumer said, according to Fox News. “It’s a formal exercise of congressional power under federal law. And we expect an answer from DOJ by Aug. 15.”
Actually, it is a stunt. It is “symbolic,” and it’s one more instance of Chuck Schumer’s nearly infinite capacity for combining deception with self-promotion.
(This is the Chuck Schumer who got the Trump nickname “Cryin’ Chuck” because of his habit of shedding manufactured tears over Democratic talking points like illegal immigration. It’s the Chuck Schumer with such a reputation for attention whoring that on his ascendancy to Democratic Senate leader, The Washington Post springboarded its story with the capital maxim that, “The most dangerous place in Washington is between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera.”)
Schumer and the Democrats standing with him know full well that the law they’re making a pretense of invoking is a liability when it comes to litigation.
They know full well that they could have used any occasion during the Biden years to publish every jot and tittle of every document that even mentioned “Jeffrey Epstein.”
And they know full well that Schumer’s news conference on Thursday was exactly what he claimed it wasn’t — a publicity stunt, a gimmick, a show aimed primarily at embarrassing the president who has bested them at every turn.
Schumer’s Democrats can’t compete with Trump when it comes to the economy — Trump’s is roaring, while Biden’s tanked. They can’t compete with him on the issues like illegal immigration — that was decided in the election. They can’t compete with him on foreign policy — the failure of the Biden years — in Afghanistan, Iran, and Ukraine — made Jimmy Carter look like a giant on the world stage.
So they have the Epstein case — a desperate resort by a desperate party that’s almost painful to watch.
What they should really know, though, is something sensible Americans concluded a long time ago: Chuck Schumer’s act is getting very, very old.
And even for Chuck Schumer, this is embarrassing.
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