Did the GOP House Judiciary Committee link to a "Rickroll" video in a tweet promising the "Epstein files?" Yes, that's true: The GOP committee posted a tweet on February 27, 2025, that said, "Breaking: Epstein Files Released," with a link that went to a video of Rick Astley singing the song "Never Gonna Give You Up," a trick known as a "Rickroll" when unsuspecting people are shown the music video instead of the expected information. The link did not go to the highly anticipated Epstein files released by the White House that day. The committee deleted the tweet, but it was archived online.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on Threads on February 27, 2025. The post read:
House Judiciary GOP linked to a Rickroll in tweet promising 'Epstein files'
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Thu Feb 27 18:02:49 2025 UTC)
Here is an archived link and a screenshot of the original tweet posted by the GOP House Judiciary Committee on their X account @JudiciaryGOP on February 27, 2025.
The post read:
#BREAKING: EPSTEIN FILES RELEASED: https://tinyurl.com/EpsteinFilesV2
Below is how the post appeared on the internet archive database at the time of this writing:
(Source: Archive.com screenshot taken on Thu Feb 27 19:21:11 2025 UTC)
The archived tinyurl link and screenshot show the original link that says EpsteinFilesV2 is redirected to a YouTube page:
(Source: Archive.com screenshot taken on Thu Feb 27 19:25:32 2025 UTC)
The archived link and screenshot for the YouTube page is Astley's video of him singing "Never Gonna Give You Up," also known as the "Rickroll," shown below:
(Source: Archive.com screenshot taken on Thu Feb 27 19:30:43 2025 UTC)
Dictionary.com explains (archived here) "Rickrolling" as:
... when you troll someone on the internet by linking to the music video for Rick Astley's 1987 hit song "Never Gonna Give You Up." It is, by far, the most popular example of bait-and-switch linking.
As Lead Stories previously reported, the so-called "Epstein Files" released by the White House and the U.S. Justice Department on February 27, 2025, did not include new information.
Epstein's flight logs from 1998 to 2004 for his Boeing 727 have been publicly available since early 2015. Copies of the flight logs have been embedded in several Lead Stories fact checks, as shown below:
Epstein Flight logs by Alan Duke
Other Lead Stories fact checks about Jeffrey Epstein can be found here.
