Bill and Hillary Clinton have dropped their opposition and agreed to testify before the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The Clintons’ reversal came as House lawmakers prepared to vote to hold the former president and former Secretary of State in contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena, a committee aide told Politico. It was not immediately clear when the Clintons are expected to appear before the committee.
The Clintons were originally scheduled to be deposed by the committee in mid-December. Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) pushed back the deposition date by a month to accommodate the Clintons’ plans to attend a funeral.
The Clintons skipped their scheduled appearance last month. Lawmakers on the committee then voted on a bipartisan basis to forward contempt charges to the House, which was scheduled to take up a vote on the charges this week.
“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 letter last month explaining their decision to flout the subpoena. “For us, now is that time.”
The Clintons argued in the letter that they had reason to believe the subpoenas to force their testimony were “legally invalid.” They said further that they “tried to give [Comer] the little information [they] have.”
“We’ve done so because Mr. Epstein’s crimes were horrific,” the letter continued. “There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.”
Neither Bill nor Hillary has been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. No evidence has been found that Hillary ever traveled with Epstein, much less boarded Epstein’s now-infamous jet, the Lolita Express.
Bill Clinton has admitted to a handful of interactions with Epstein, including four trips on board Epstein’s jet, a meeting at Epstein’s Harlem office in 2002, and “one brief visit to Epstein’s New York apartment.” Reports and court filings have suggested numerous other encounters took place, however.
The former president took at least 27 flights on Epstein’s plane, according to a review of flight logs by The Washington Examiner.
Epstein visited the Clinton White House multiple times throughout the 1990s and attended “a donors’ reception hosted by Bill and Hillary Clinton” in 1993, according to a 2019 report in The Daily Beast. Epstein attended the reception after making a $10,000 donation to the White House Historical Association.
The House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into Epstein last year to develop an understanding of the disgraced financier’s “sex trafficking network, the ways Epstein sought to curry favor and influence to evade scrutiny, and how Congress can strengthen laws to better combat human trafficking,” according to the committee.
Epstein died in 2019 in his jail cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. Since taking over a year ago, the Trump administration has released millions of pages worth of documents, files, communications, and other evidence in the “Epstein files.”
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