The House oversight committee will move to hold Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress, its Republican chair James Comer said on Wednesday, after the former first lady joined her husband Bill Clinton in refusing to comply with a subpoena for testimony regarding the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The announcement came a day after the Clintons said they would not honor subpoenas from the investigative panel to discuss Epstein, a former friend of the ex-president, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
“Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton joined her husband in defying a bipartisan, lawful congressional subpoena to show up today,” Comer told reporters on Wednesday morning, after the deadline for Hillary Clinton to appear passed.
“We’re going to hold both Clintons in criminal contempt of Congress.”
The oversight committee will consider a contempt resolution next Wednesday, Comer said. The measure will need to be approved by the panel and the full House of Representatives, both of which are controlled by the GOP, before it is referred to the justice department, which would decide whether to seek an indictment before a grand jury.
Bill Clinton’s office later released sworn declarations it said were shared with the oversight committee in which both the former president and first lady deny any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, and said they were not involved in the government’s investigations into him.
When the committee convened for Hillary Clinton’s deposition, a Democratic aide criticized Comer and the Republicans for “relentlessly” seeking Hillary Clinton’s testimony but not being similarly aggressive in interviewing other witnesses, or enforcing a subpoena sent to the justice department for its records related to Epstein.
The aide also noted that Donald Trump had called for attorney general Pam Bondi and the FBI to investigate Bill Clinton’s links with Epstein.
“Against that backdrop, oversight Democrats have grave concerns about the president’s publicly stated expectation that DoJ and the FBI will incriminate leaders of the opposition party, as well as the president’s demonstrated willingness to use the nation’s law enforcement agencies to distract from his own lengthy relationship and interaction with Epstein,” the aide said, according to a transcript that was released by Bill Clinton’s office and verified by the Guardian.
The oversight committee subpoenaed the Clintons together with several former attorneys general and FBI directors last August after the justice department sparked outrage by announcing that the Epstein matter was closed. That incensed Trump supporters who believed that the late financier lay at the center of a larger plot, which they expected the president to reveal.
In the months that followed, the committee made public documents obtained by Epstein’s estate which detailed his relationship with Trump, a one-time friend who insisted that he cut ties with the financier before his 2008 guilty plea to state charges of solicitation of prostitution and solicitation of prostitution with a minor in Florida.
Separately, a bipartisan group of lawmakers forced through Congress legislation that has required the release of government files related to the Epstein case. Bill Clinton, who was known to socialize with Epstein in the late 1990s and early 2000s, has been shown in some photos made public as a result of that law, including one of the former president in a hot tub and swimming in a pool. Clinton has not been accused of any wrongdoing related to Epstein and has long denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
In a letter to Comer, attorneys for the Clintons argued that the oversight committee’s subpoenas were “invalid and legally unenforceable, untethered to a valid legislative purpose, unwarranted because they do not seek pertinent information, and an unprecedented infringement on the separation of powers”.
The former first couple separately issued a joint statement in which they blasted the policies that Trump and Congress’s Republican majorities had supported over the past year, and said that they would welcome contempt of Congress proceedings as a way to prevent them from doing more damage.
“Bringing the Republicans’ cruel agenda to a standstill while you work harder to pass a contempt charge against us than you have done on your investigation this past year would be our contribution to fighting the madness,” the Clintons wrote.
Prosecutions for contempt of Congress were once rare, but during Joe Biden’s presidency, two former advisers to Trump – Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon – served jail time after being convicted on the charge for ignoring subpoenas from the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 attack.
