A quiet, months-long battle between James Comer, the Republican chair of the US House of Representatives’ oversight committee, and Bill and Hillary Clinton over the panel’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation could come to a head this week.
Comer has threatened to begin contempt of Congress proceedings against them if they fail to appear in person for depositions.
The threat is the starkest example yet of the attempt by house Republicans to shift the focus of the Epstein affair away from US president Donald Trump and his administration and on to prominent Democrats who once associated with the convicted sex offender and his long-time companion, Ghislaine Maxwell.
After Democrats on his panel effectively forced him to subpoena the US Department of Justice for its files, Comer also issued subpoenas in August to the Clintons, as well as to eight former top law enforcement officials. Since then, the chair has withdrawn the subpoenas for five former attorneys general who wrote in statements to the panel that they had no knowledge relevant to the investigation.
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The committee also excused former FBI directors James Comey and Robert Mueller from giving live depositions. Only one person, former attorney general Bill Barr, has appeared to testify.
But Comer has refused to excuse the Clintons, even though they have repeatedly offered to provide the same kind of sworn statement to the committee.
Instead, Comer has falsely accused them of ignoring his subpoenas and continued to demand that they appear for live depositions or face the possibility of being held in contempt, typically a first step in referring someone to the justice department for prosecution.
For months, the Clintons have been engaging with Comer far more than was previously known, to respond to his requests and avoid having to appear on Capitol Hill.
Their long-time attorney, David Kendall, has sent three letters explaining in detail his argument that the Clintons should be required only to provide sworn statements to the committee. On September 30th, Kendall met in person with Comer’s staff to discuss the requests.
Comer, in response, has only amped up his threats to penalise the Clintons if they fail to show up in person.
“The former president and former secretary of state have delayed, obstructed and largely ignored the committee staff’s efforts to schedule their testimony,” Comer said in a statement on Friday night.
He again threatened to start contempt proceedings against them if they did not appear before his committee on December 17th and 18th, or schedule a date in early January to do so.
In a letter last week, Kendall accused Comer of going after the Clintons with “weaponised legislative investigations and targeted criminal prosecutions,” and said that it was neither appropriate or tenable for them to appear and be held to a different standard than others who had been excused.
“President Trump has consistently sought to divert attention from his own relationship with Mr Epstein and unfortunately the committee appears to be complicit,” Kendall wrote in the letter, one of three supplied by a Democratic lawmaker that have not been previously disclosed.
He said that Comer’s only reason for targeting the Clintons was “to catalyse a public spectacle for partisan purposes”.
Bill Clinton was acquainted with Epstein – an association the former president described in his memoir – but never visited his private island, and cut off contact with him two decades ago. He took four international trips on Epstein’s private jet in 2002 and 2003, according to flight logs, and an undated photograph of Bill Clinton and Epstein signed by the former president was part of a batch of images released by House Democrats last week highlighting Epstein’s ties to powerful men.
“Given what came to light much after,” Kendall wrote to Comer in one of his letters, “he has expressed regret for even that limited association.”
Angel Ureña, a spokesperson for Bill Clinton, said that “for months, we’ve been offering the same exact thing he accepted from the rest, but he refuses and won’t explain why.”
He added: “Make of that what you will.”
Nick Merrill, a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton, said that “since this started, we’ve been asking what the hell Hillary Clinton has to do with this, and he hasn’t been able to come up with an answer.”
For Bill Clinton to appear on Capitol Hill to testify in the Epstein case would be nearly unprecedented. No former president has appeared before Congress since 1983, when president Gerald Ford did so to discuss the celebration of the 1987 bicentennial of the enactment of the Constitution.
When Trump was subpoenaed by the January 6th select committee in 2022, while he was out of office, he sued the panel to try to block it. The panel ultimately withdrew the subpoena.
In an October 6th letter, Kendall wrote to Comer that the Clintons should be treated the same way as the five former attorneys general who were excused from his subpoenas because they said they had no information pertaining to the investigation.
“We submit that the Clintons likewise do not have knowledge relevant to the committee’s investigation,” Kendall wrote in that letter.
Kendall added: “There is simply no reasonable justification for compelling a former president and secretary of state to appear personally, given that their time and roles in government had no connection to the matter at hand.”
The request for information from Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign rival, appeared to be the more perplexing of the two. Hillary Clinton had “no personal knowledge of Epstein or Maxwell’s criminal activities, never flew on his aircraft, never visited his island and cannot recall ever speaking to Epstein,” Kendall wrote.
Her connection to Maxwell, he said, involved “limited contact” during a time when Maxwell was in a relationship with a mutual friend.
In a follow-up letter he sent on November 3rd, Kendall wrote that “subpoenaing former secretary Clinton is on its face both purposeless and harassing”.
When he met Comer’s staff to discuss the subpoena in person, he added, no reason was given for wanting to question Hillary Clinton “beyond wanting to ask if she had ever spoken with her husband about this matter”. (Any conversations the two of them might have had, he noted as an aside, would be protected by marital privilege.)
Kendall said that the focus on the Clintons as “fact witnesses” when others had been allowed to decline to testify raised questions about the neutrality of what was supposed to be a non-partisan committee.
“To date,” Kendall wrote in his November 3rd letter, “the committee has elected to forego deposing seven of the eight individuals, all of whom are not named Clinton.”
The only former official who was subpoenaed and testified live was Barr, who served as attorney general when Epstein was investigated, indicted and died by suicide while in federal custody.
Kendall’s most recent letter was sent on December 10th. His tone and language had become more aggressive.
“We urge you to acknowledge that we are asking for nothing more than the same basic fairness offered to the attorneys general who ran the DOJ while the Epstein investigations were being conducted,” Kendall wrote. “We remain ready, as we have been for months, to provide sworn statements to satisfy the committee’s oversight efforts.”
Two days after the letter was sent, Comer again threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt if they did not appear in person.
– This article originally appeared in the New York Times
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