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Annie Karni
Washington: Bill and Hillary Clinton have agreed to testify in the House oversight committee’s investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, capitulating to the demands of the panel’s Republican chair days before the House was set to vote to hold the couple in criminal contempt of Congress.
For months, the Clintons were adamant that they would not comply with subpoenas from congressman James Comer, the panel’s Republican chair, that they described as invalid and legally unenforceable. They accused Comer of being part of a plot to target them as US President Donald Trump’s political adversaries and promised to fight him on the issue for as long as it took.
But 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 Department of Justice for prosecution, the Clintons ultimately waved the white flag and agreed to fully comply with Comer’s demands.
In an email sent to Comer on Monday evening (Tuesday AEDT), 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.
“They negotiated in good faith. You did not,” spokespeople for the Clintons said in a statement. “They told under oath what they know, but you did not care. But the former president and former secretary of state will be there.”
For Bill Clinton to testify in the Epstein investigation would be nearly unprecedented. No former president has appeared before Congress since 1983, when Gerald Ford did so to discuss the celebration of the 1987 bicentennial of the enactment of the Constitution. When Trump was subpoenaed in 2022 by the select committee investigating the January 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.
The Clintons’ move capped a months-long battle between them and Comer. It was a victory for the Republican chair’s efforts to shift the focus of his panel’s Epstein investigation away from Trump’s ties to Epstein and the president’s administration’s handling of the matter, and onto prominent Democrats who once associated with the disgraced financier and his long-time companion, Ghislaine Maxwell.
In a letter on Saturday to Comer, obtained by The New York Times, Bill Clinton’s lawyers tried one more time to put some guardrails on potential interviews with the Clintons. They said Bill Clinton would agree to sit for a four-hour transcribed interview with the entire committee – something he had previously described as an inappropriate and unprecedented request to make of a former president.
The lawyers asked that Hillary Clinton, who has said she never met or spoke to Epstein, be allowed to make a sworn declaration instead of testifying. But they said that she, too, would submit to an in-person interview if the committee insisted on it, “with appropriate adjustments for the paucity of information she has to offer in this matter”, according to the letter.
But Comer flatly rejected the offer, calling it “unreasonable” and arguing that four hours of testimony from Bill Clinton was inadequate given that he was a “loquacious individual” who might seek to run out the clock.
“Your clients’ desire for special treatment is both frustrating and an affront to the American people’s desire for transparency,” Comer wrote in a letter sent to the Clintons’ lawyers on Monday that was also obtained by the Times.
In that letter, Comer also rejected the demand from Bill Clinton that the scope of the interview be limited to matters related to Epstein. Comer said the former president “likely has an artificially narrow definition in mind” of what matters would be related to the Epstein investigation.
Comer said he had concerns that Clinton would refuse to answer questions about “his personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, ways in which they sought to curry favour with powerful individuals and alleged efforts to utilise his power and influence after his presidency to kill negative news stories about Jeffrey Epstein”.
In response to Comer’s letter, the Clintons on Monday evening agreed to all of Comer’s demands, removing any time limit on the deposition of Bill Clinton or on the range of topics that Republicans could ask him about.
The only point of negotiation that Comer had previously been amenable to was conducting the interviews in New York, where the Clintons live and work.
Bill Clinton was acquainted with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019, but has said he never visited Epstein’s private island and cut off contact with him two decades ago. Clinton took four international trips on Epstein’s private jet in 2002 and 2003, according to flight logs.
While some House Democrats last month voted with Republicans to hold the Clintons in contempt of Congress, others expressed disgust at the entire situation, and in particular about the inclusion of Hillary Clinton.
“I’m not seeing anything to suggest she ought to be a part of this in any way,” congressman Kweisi Mfume said at a hearing last month. He noted that it looked like the former secretary of state had been included because “we want to dust her up a bit if we get her before this committee”.
The offer from the Clintons represented a total surrender after they made a defiant stand just weeks ago, vowing to fight back against an investigation they said was unfairly targeting them and holding them to a different standard from others.
“Every person has to decide when they have seen or had enough and are ready to fight for this country, its principles and its people, no matter the consequences,” the Clintons wrote in a lengthy letter to Comer on January 13. “For us, now is that time.”
Up to the final moment, the Clintons had tried to negotiate with the House oversight committee behind the scenes to find a way for Comer to spare them the contempt vote and lift the subpoenas. They said Comer and the top Democrat on the panel could interview Bill Clinton under oath, an offer that the chair also rejected, because he insisted the former president appear before the entire committee for an open-ended, transcribed interview.
For the Clintons, the entire saga was a continuation of the Republican assault on them that has been the background noise of their entire life on the national political stage.
In the January letter, the Clintons accused Comer of potentially bringing Congress to a halt to pursue a politically driven process “literally designed to result in our imprisonment”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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