Bill and Hillary Clinton are scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee in October as the panel probes the investigations into pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein and his convicted sex trafficking accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the Oversight committee, tweeted out a list of testimony dates on Tuesday for upcoming witnesses — including the former president and secretary of state — compelled by subpoena to appear.
A number of other top federal officials including former Attorney General Merrick Garland are also set to testify.
President Clinton’s friendship with Epstein makes his appearance one of the few called by the committee unrelated to the official duties of his office. Fox News also reported that the DOJ has issued a subpoena for records related to the investigation. The schedule of depositions includes former attorneys general who served through the first Trump term and dating back through the Bush administration.
Hillary Clinton’s connection to the case was spelled out in a cover letter released by the Oversight Committee indicating she’ll be questioned about why Ghislaine Maxwell’s nephew worked on her presidential campaign and later at the State Department during her tenure in the Obama administration.
“Your family appears to have had a close relationship with both Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. For example, your husband President William “Bill” Jefferson Clinton, by his own admission, flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane four separate times in 2002 and 2003 on trips for your family’s foundation, the Clinton Foundation,” reads the letter to the former Democratic presidential nominee.
“During one of these trips, he was even pictured receiving a ‘massage’ from one of Mr. Epstein’s victims,” the letter continues.
“Moreover, your husband was allegedly close to Ms. Maxwell, while Ms. Maxwell’s nephew worked for your 2008 presidential campaign and was hired by the State Department shortly after you became Secretary of State.”
The committee is set to begin taking depositions from witnesses beginning with former Trump first term attorney general William Barr in a few weeks. The committee also voted to subpoena Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned and convicted co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein, but that subpoena remains on hold pending Maxwell’s appeal of her conviction.
Attorneys for the imprisoned British socialite claim that she would be willing to testify to the Oversight committee in exchange for a clemency deal. Her lawyers said Maxwell would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights not to testify unless she was offered immunity.
The Maxwell angle of the Epstein case evolved into a new bizarre twist last month after the Justice Department’s memo claiming that a so-called “Epstein Client List” detailing the billionaire’s alleged accomplices, was not found in the troves of the FBI and DOJ’s files on the case. The agency also stated that Epstein, who died in federal custody in 2019, committed suicide.
The statement about the client list’s supposed nonexistence contradicted statements from Attorney General Pam Bondi and others, while frustrating both the president’s MAGA base and millions of other Americans who expected transparency from the administration after it called right-wing influencers to the White House earlier this year to receive binders of documents pertaining to the investigations.
A resulting uproar led the Trump administration to look for a way out. At the Justice Department, deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (who is also the president’s former personal attorney) conducted a private meeting with Maxwell at the Florida prison where she was being held, and declined to issue a statement afterwards.
Maxwell was then transferred to a minimum security facility, stunning the president’s critics and pouring gasoline on speculation around the idea of a possible cover-up.
President Trump, separately, has sought to distract his MAGA base by launching a renewed effort to attack Barack Obama and members of his national security team for the 2016 Russia investigation while he and members of his administration make vague promises about released information about the Epstein case.
On Monday, the DOJ confirmed that the grand jury transcripts it was seeking to release amid the uproar actually contained information that was already public. The DOJ claimed in its July memo that it would not release any further nonpublic information about the investigation due to concerns about releasing child pornography or identifying information about victims, provoking a standoff with Congress.
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