Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he is still negotiating potential changes to the White House’s funding clawback request hours before he wants to take an initial floor vote.

Asked if he had reached a deal to amend the $9.4 billion rescissions package and secure enough votes to pass it, Thune said in a brief interview that “we’re working on something, but I don’t think it’s quite ready yet.”

Thune will need 51 votes to take up the White House effort to claw back public media and global health funding. Several GOP senators huddled Monday night to discuss potential changes or clarifications they want, and White House budget director Russ Vought is coming to the Capitol on Tuesday to talk with GOP senators.

Thune separately told reporters Tuesday that while he supports the package as is, “we have colleagues who would like to see some perhaps modest changes made, so we’re trying to find out if there’s a path forward that gets us 51” and would still be consistent with the White House’s proposal.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said in an interview with POLITICO he has confidence in Attorney General Pam Bondi as she faces a backlash from the MAGA base.

The former attorney general of Missouri said in an interview on “The Conversation” with Dasha Burns he couldn’t opine on the Justice Department’s handling of the files related to Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal charges and death, acknowledging that he doesn’t know what the unreleased files contain. But he offered support for the attorney general herself.

“President Trump has a great deal of trust in Pam Bondi, and Pam Bondi is running the Department of Justice,” Schmitt said in the interview, which was taped Tuesday and is set to air in full on Sunday. “And I think she’s doing a good job and she’s got great people around her.”

Trump came to Bondi’s defense earlier in the day, telling reporters: “She’s really done a very good job” despite calls for her resignation from far-right activists. Bondi said Tuesday she’d serve “as long as the president wants me here,” declining to comment on reported conflict between her and FBI leadership over the handling of the files.

Rep. Thomas Massie announced Tuesday he’d kickstart a longshot procedural maneuver to force a vote on releasing Jeffrey Epstein-related files.

The Kentucky Republican, alongside Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), is launching a so-called discharge petition to bypass leadership and allow a floor vote on the release of the materials — provided the petition gets the 218 lawmaker signatures.

“We all deserve to know what’s in the Epstein files, who’s implicated, and how deep this corruption goes,” Massie wrote on X. “Americans were promised justice and transparency.”

The discharge petition gambit is rarely successful, with many majority-party members hesitant to buck their own leaders even if they support the underlying premise. But Republicans have been roiled by divisions over the Trump administration’s handling of the investigation into Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail after being charged with sex trafficking.

Some Republicans like Massie have called for more disclosure from the administration after the Justice Department said there was no evidence Epstein had a “client list” or that he was murdered, despite suggestion from President Donald Trump and his allies during the 2024 campaign that they believed such information was being hidden from the public. Democrats, in turn, have needled the GOP over the controversy and attempted to turn a procedural vote Tuesday into a referendum on releasing more Epstein files.

Speaker Mike Johnson said he hopes to try again Wednesday on a procedural vote that would allow the House to take up a slate of cryptocurrency bills after GOP hard-liners tanked the measure Tuesday afternoon.

Republicans are “still having conversations, answering questions for people,” Johnson told reporters leaving the Capitol.

Asked how he might win over conservative holdouts, the Louisiana Republican said “it’s a priority of the White House, the Senate and the House to do all of these crypto bills.”

House conservatives are calling on GOP leaders to amend a Senate-passed bill to regulate so-called stablecoins or package it with two other digital assets bills that were slated for floor votes this week in a bid to force the Senate to take all of them up together.

But Johnson said leaving the Capitol Tuesday that “we have to do them in succession,” suggesting that GOP leaders won’t seek to directly link the bills in one package.

A combined package that ties the Senate’s stablecoin legislation with the two other bills — a sweeping crypto market structure bill and a third measure that would ban a central bank digital currency — would likely be dead on arrival in the upper chamber.

“We cannot stuff these into one package,” one senior House Republican said, noting that it would trigger a host of issues.

Speaker Mike Johnson is calling for the Department of Justice to release all of its information on Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail after being charged with sex trafficking, and wants Attorney General Pam Bondi to explain previous statements on the matter.

The Trump administration this month declined to release additional information regarding Epstein’s death, with the Justice Department and FBI concluding there’s no evidence that Epstein had a list of clients or was murdered in his jail cell. Republicans blocked a House vote on Tuesday afternoon that Democrats tried to cast as a referendum to force the White House to release the files.

In an interview published shortly after the vote, Johnson told conservative commentator Benny Johnson that he is “for transparency.”

“It’s a very delicate subject, but you should put everything out there, let the people decide it,” the Louisiana Republican said.

He added that Bondi needs to clarify previous remarks she made about having some sort of “client list” of Epstein’s — pivoting from Monday when he threw his support behind the attorney general.

“I think she was talking about documents, as I understood that were on her desk. I don’t know that she was specific about a list or whatever, but she needs to come forward and explain that to everybody,” Johnson said.

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In February, Bondi told Fox News that files related to the Epstein investigation — including a document suspected to include high-profile names associated with his sex crimes — was “sitting on my desk right now.”

But in a Cabinet meeting earlier this month, Bondi denied saying she had a client list.

“My response was, it’s sitting on my desk to be reviewed. Meaning the file, along with the JFK and MLK files,” Bondi said during the meeting.

Some of Trump’s top supporters, including congressional lawmakers and his former senior adviser Elon Musk, have

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