Bill and Hillary Clinton have declared themselves above the law as they refused to testify before Congress on Jeffrey Epstein on Tuesday.
The ex-president was scheduled to testify at a closed-door deposition in the House Oversight Committee’s bipartisan investigation into Epstein at 10am but failed to show. Hillary was slated to appear on Wednesday.
House Oversight’s Republican chair James Comer promised to being contempt proceedings next week, setting off a potentially protracted and politically fraught process that Congress has rarely embarked on in history.
In an astonishing letter to Comer, the Clintons launched a broadside at Donald Trump and the Republican lawmakers carrying out his ‘cruel agenda.’
They claimed that a legal analysis submitted to the committee proved that they were not required to testify and insisted that the subpoenas were an extension of Trump’s ‘weaponization’ of the law.
The Clintons wrote: ‘The Justice Department has been used as a weapon, at the direction of the President, to pursue political opponents. And most recently and searingly, an ICE agent killed an unarmed mother only days ago.
‘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. For us, now is that time.’
The Clintons cited the precedent set by Trump in October 2022 when the president defied a congressional subpoena demanding his testimony over the Capitol riot.
Former president Bill Clinton and a woman are seen in this newly released image from the Epstein estate
Former president Bill Clinton (R) and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton arrive at inauguration ceremonies swearing in Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 20, 2017
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell grinning with Bill Clinton during a VIP tour of the White House
‘A legal analysis prepared by two law firms and provided to you yesterday makes clear your subpoenas are legally invalid,’ the Clintons wrote.
‘You claim your subpoenas are inviolate when they are used against us yet were silent when the sitting President took the same position, as a former president, barely more than three years ago.
‘We call on you to release that analysis to the public to allow them to see how this is yet another example of the casual disregard of the law of the land.
‘All the while, you have done nothing with your oversight capacity to force the Department of Justice to follow the law and release all its Epstein files, including any material regarding us as we have publicly called for.’
Only two other former presidents, John Tyler and Harry Truman, and one sitting president, Richard Nixon, have been formally subpoenaed by Congress to testify. Truman and Nixon both refused to comply.
While the Supreme Court has never definitively ruled on whether a president can be compelled to give testimony to Congress, the DOJ has historically argued that presidents have ‘testimonial immunity’ to enshrine the separation of powers.
By citing the precedent set by Trump, the Clintons are testing whether the courts will treat former presidents as a protected class.
Clinton has never been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein but had a well-documented friendship with Epstein throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Republicans have zeroed in on that relationship as they try to wrestle control over demands for a full accounting of Epstein’s wrongdoing.
Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. He killed himself in a New York jail cell while awaiting trial.
