Clintons raise white flag after a months-long battle not to testify on Epstein
Annie Karni
Washington: Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed to testify in the House oversight committee’s investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, capitulating to the Republican president’s demands days before the House is expected to vote to hold them in criminal contempt of Congress.
For months, the Clintons have been adamant about not complying with subpoenas from the panel’s Republican chairman, congressman James Comer, which they describe as invalid and legally unenforceable. They accused Comer of being part of a conspiracy targeting them as political rivals of US President Donald Trump and vowed to fight him over the issue for however long it took.
But after some Democrats on the panel joined Republicans in a vote recommending charges of criminal contempt, an extraordinary first step in sending them to the Justice Department for prosecution, the Clintons eventually waved the white flag and agreed to fully comply with Comer’s demands.
In an email to Comer on Monday evening (Tuesday AEDT), Clinton lawyers said their client would “appear for deposition on mutually agreeable dates” and asked the House not to move forward with a contempt vote scheduled for Wednesday.
“They negotiated in good faith. You did not,” a spokesperson for the Clintons said in a statement. “They took an oath and told what they knew, but you didn’t care. But the former president and the former foreign minister will also be there.”
It would be almost unprecedented for Bill Clinton to testify in the Epstein investigation. No former president has appeared before Congress since 1983, when Gerald Ford appeared before Congress in 1987 to discuss the bicentennial celebrations of the Constitution’s enactment. When Trump was subpoenaed in 2022 by the select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, he filed a lawsuit after leaving office to try to block the panel. The panel ultimately withdrew the subpoena.
The Clintons’ move ended a months-long fight between them and Comer. It was a victory for the Republican president’s efforts to shift the focus of his panel’s Epstein investigation away from Trump’s ties to Epstein and his administration’s handling of the matter and toward prominent Democrats once involved with the disgraced financier and his longtime friend Ghislaine Maxwell.
In a letter sent to Comer on Saturday, New York TimesBill Clinton’s lawyers once again tried to put up some barriers to possible meetings with the Clintons. They said Bill Clinton would agree to participate in a four-hour, scripted interview with the full committee; it was something he had previously described as an inappropriate and unprecedented request to make from a former president.
Lawyers asked that Hillary Clinton, who said she had never met or spoken to Epstein, be allowed to submit an affidavit instead of testifying. However, if the committee insisted, they said he would also submit to a face-to-face meeting, “with appropriate arrangements made in view of the lack of information he can provide on this matter,” according to the letter.
But Comer flatly rejected the offer, calling it “unreasonable” and arguing that Bill Clinton’s four hours of testimony were insufficient, given that he was a “loquacious individual” who might try to run out the clock.
“Your clients’ desire for special treatment is both frustrating and an insult to the American people’s desire for transparency,” Comer wrote in a letter sent to the Clintons’ lawyers on Monday and also obtained by the United States. Times.
In that letter, Comer also rejected Bill Clinton’s request that the scope of the interview be limited to Epstein-related matters. Comer said the former president “probably had an artificially narrow definition in mind” of issues related to the Epstein investigation.
Comer said he had concerns that Clinton would refuse to answer questions about “her personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, her ways of currying favor with powerful people, and her allegations of using her power and influence to kill negative coverage of Jeffrey Epstein after his presidency.”
In response to Comer’s letter, the Clintons agreed to all of Comer’s demands Monday evening, removing time limits on Bill Clinton testifying or various issues Republicans could ask him about.
The only negotiating point Comer previously agreed to was to hold talks in New York, where the Clintons live and work.
Bill Clinton knew Epstein, who died in prison in 2019, but said he never visited Epstein’s private island and kept in touch with him two decades ago. Clinton took four international trips on Epstein’s private jet in 2002 and 2003, according to flight records.
Last month, some Democrats in the House of Representatives voted with Republicans to hold the Clintons in contempt of Congress, while others expressed disgust with the whole situation, especially the inclusion of Hillary Clinton in Congress.
“I don’t see anything that would suggest that he should be a part of this in any way,” Congressman Kweisi Mfume said at a hearing last month, adding that the former foreign minister also appeared to be included because “we want to dust him off a little bit if we get him before this committee.”
The offer from the Clintons represented a complete capitulation after taking a defiant stance several weeks ago, pledging to fight an investigation they said unfairly targeted them and held them to a different standard than others.
“Everyone must decide that he or she is ready to fight for this country, its principles, and its people, regardless of the consequences,” the Clintons wrote in a long letter to Comer on Jan. 13. “Now is the time for us.”
Until the last moment, the Clintons were trying behind the scenes to negotiate with the House oversight committee to get Comer to spare them from a contempt vote and drop the subpoenas. They said Comer and the top Democrat on the panel could interview Bill Clinton under oath; It was an offer the president also rejected, insisting that the former president appear before the full committee for an open-ended, written interview.
For the Clintons, the entire saga was a continuation of the attack on them by Republicans who had been the background noise of their entire lives on the national political stage.
In the January letter, the Clintons accused Comer of potentially grinding Congress to a halt to continue a politically motivated process “literally designed to result in our incarceration.”
This article was first published on: New York Times.
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