WASHINGTON — The Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced Tuesday that it will seek to hold former President Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress after he failed to appear for a deposition as part of the panel's probe into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
House Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., said that because Clinton decided not to show up “for his lawful subpoena,” the panel would vote on holding him in contempt next week.
“We’ve communicated with President Clinton’s legal team for months now, giving them opportunity after opportunity, to come in, to give us a day, and they continue to delay, delay, delay to the point where we had no idea whether they’re going to show up today or not," Comer said. "I think it’s very disappointing.”
The committee had scheduled a deposition with Clinton for Tuesday morning, as well as a deposition with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Wednesday, as a result of subpoenas issued last year.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters Monday night that it “would be contempt of Congress” if the Clintons did not attend this week’s depositions.
In a letter to Comer, the Clintons said they didn't plan to appear for the scheduled depositions, arguing that the subpoenas are “legally invalid” and citing legal analysis prepared by two law firms that they said were provided to the committee Monday.
“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. “For us, now is that time.”
They also addressed the prospect of the committee voting to hold them in contempt.
“We expect you will direct your committee to seek to hold us in contempt,” the Clintons wrote, adding, “You will say it is not our decision to make. But we have made it. Now you have to make yours.”
"Despite everything that needs to be done to help our country, you are on the cusp of bringing Congress to a halt to pursue a rarely used process literally designed to result in our imprisonment," they wrote. "This is not the way out of America's ills, and we will forcefully defend ourselves."
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., an Oversight Committee member who led a bipartisan push to force a floor vote on the release of the Epstein files last year, told NBC News that Clinton should appear for testimony.
"I have always said that this needs to be transparent," Khanna said Tuesday. "Everyone involved should be providing an explanation, and I have conducted this in a way that doesn’t single out Republicans or Democrats."
"If Democrats are implicated, then so be it," he added.
Other House Democrats who spoke with NBC News, like Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, did not go as far.
Goldman called Comer's subpoena of the former president "absolutely absurd."
"This is a distraction," he said.
Comer subpoenaed the Clintons to appear for depositions for testimony related to the former president's relationship with Epstein. The committee originally scheduled the couple's depositions for last October.
"No one’s accused of Bill Clinton of any wrongdoing," Comer said in his remarks Tuesday morning. "We just have questions."
In December, Comer said he would postpone the depositions for a second time because the Clintons needed to attend a funeral, but he said the Clintons' lawyer, David Kendall, was “unwilling to provide any alternative dates" for their testimony, so he was setting the depositions for mid-January.
Clinton's spokesperson, Angel Ureña, said of Comer in December, “For months, we’ve been offering the same exact thing he accepted from the rest, but he refuses and won’t explain why,” apparently referring to the committee's acceptance of written statements, rather than in-person depositions, from some other former government officials, including former U.S. attorneys general. "Make of that what you will," Ureña added.
Hillary Clinton's spokesperson, Nick Merrill, also said in statement last month, “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."
The first set of Epstein files released by the Justice Department in December contained numerous pictures of Clinton, who Ureña said had flown on Epstein’s plane for Clinton Foundation trips in the early 2000s, before Epstein was charged with any sex crimes. There were a series of undated pictures, for example, with Epstein's girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, and what looked like a trip to Thailand. It's unclear when the photos were taken.
Clinton has denied any wrongdoing and has said he was unaware of Epstein’s crimes. He has said that he cut ties with Epstein before Epstein was accused in 2006 of having sex with a minor. Ureña said in December that all photos and references to Clinton in the government’s files should be released.
Ureña said in a post on X after the release that the “White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton. This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be.”
Before the files were publicly released, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair that she had read the Epstein case file and said Trump "was wrong” to suggest that there was anything incriminating about Clinton in the records.
The Justice Department said last week that it still has yet to release more than 2 million files related to Epstein. The department so far has make public only a small fraction of the files, missing a Dec. 19 deadline to release all unclassified records under a law passed by Congress in November.
