House oversight chair says panel will move to hold Hillary Clinton in contempt

The House oversight committee will move to hold Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress, its Republican chair James Comer said Wednesday, after the former first lady refused to comply with a subpoena for testimony regarding the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The announcement came a day after both Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president Bill Clinton, said they would not honor subpoenas from the investigative panel to discuss Epstein, a one-time friend 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.

“We’re going to hold both Clintons in criminal contempt of Congress.”

The contempt charge will need to be approved by the oversight committee and then the House of Representatives, both of which are led by Republicans. It would then be referred to the justice department, which would decide whether to seek an indictment before a grand jury.

A spokeswoman for Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on oversight, did not respond to a request for comment about holding Hillary Clinton in contempt. After the former president refused to honor his subpoena on Tuesday, Garcia’s spokeswoman Sara Guerrero said: “Cooperating with Congress is important and the Committee should continue working with President Clinton’s team to obtain any information that might be relevant to our investigation.”

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 supporters of Donald Trump 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 ongoing 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.