Clintons Bend The Knee To Comer, Agree To Testify In House Epstein Inquiry
Just hours after Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) rebuffed Bill and Hillary Clinton's attorney's last-ditch conditional offer, the former president and former secretary of state appear to have acquiesced and agreed to key demands from the Republican-led House Oversight Committee to testify about Jeffrey Epstein in a closed-door deposition.
The initial correspondence, obtained by CNN, revealed that the Clintons’ team has been in search of an off-ramp for days.
Attorneys for Bill and Hillary have been in discussion with the Republican-led committee multiple times since lawmakers from both parties voted in January to hold the Clintons in contempt for refusing to appear for in-person depositions as part of the panel’s investigation into Epstein.
“It has been nearly six months since your clients first received the Committee’s subpoena, more than three months since the original date of their depositions, and nearly three weeks since they failed to appear for their depositions commensurate with the Committee’s lawful subpoenas,” Comer wrote.
“Your clients’ desire for special treatment is both frustrating and an affront to the American people’s desire for transparency.”
As CNN reports, according to the letter dated January 31, the Clintons’ lawyers laid out the terms under which the former president would sit for a voluntary, transcribed interview.
He would sit for four hours in New York City for an interview limited to the scope of the Epstein probe, they said.
Lawmakers from both parties and their staff could ask questions, and the lawyers said both the Clintons and the committee could have their own transcriber present, according to the letter.
Comer rejected the offer from the Clintons’ attorneys as “unreasonable” and said he could not accept such terms.
He could not agree, he said, to changing the interview from a sworn deposition to a voluntary interview, and rejected the way in which the attorneys sought to limit the interview’s scope.
“But given that he has already failed to appear for a deposition and has refused for several months to provide the Committee with in-person testimony, the Committee cannot simply have faith that President Clinton will not refuse to answer questions at a transcribed interview, resulting in the Committee being right back where it is today,” the Kentucky Republican wrote.
By rejecting the Clintons’ initial offer, Comer had all but ensured that the House would hold a final vote this week on the contempt resolutions.
“Your clients’ desire for special treatment is both frustrating and an affront to the American people’s desire for transparency,” Mr. Comer wrote in a letter to the Clintons’ lawyers on Monday that was also obtained by The New York Times.
Indeed, as The NYTimes reports, after some Democrats on the panel joined Republicans in a vote to recommend charging them with criminal contempt, an extraordinary first step in referring them to the Justice Department for prosecution, the Clintons ultimately waved the white flag and agreed to fully comply with Mr. Comer’s demands.
In an email sent to Mr. Comer on Monday evening, attorneys for the Clintons said their clients would “appear for depositions on mutually agreeable dates” and asked that the House not move forward with a contempt vote, which had been slated for Wednesday.
However, it was not immediately clear Monday evening whether Comer would accept the Clintons' terms and, subsequently, whether the contempt votes would still take place.
Comer said:
"The Clintons' counsel has said they agree to terms, but those terms lack clarity yet again and they have provided no dates for their depositions. The only reason they have said they agree to terms is because the House has moved forward with contempt."
"I will clarify the terms they are agreeing to and then discuss next steps with my committee members," Comer said in a statement.
For Mr. Clinton to testify in the Epstein investigation would be nearly unprecedented.
No former president has appeared before Congress since 1983, when President Gerald R. Ford did so to discuss the celebration of the 1987 bicentennial of the enactment of the Constitution.
When Mr. Trump was subpoenaed in 2022 by the select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, after he had left office, he sued the panel to try to block it. The panel ultimately withdrew the subpoena.
It was a victory for the Republican chairman, shifting the focus of his panel’s Epstein investigation onto prominent Democrats who once associated with the disgraced financier and his longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell.