Jeffrey

Nov. 21 (UPI) — House Republicans have called on former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to testify before a committee investigating Jeffrey Epstein.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., issued congressional subpoenas seeking Bill Clinton’s testimony Dec. 17 and Hillary Clinton a day later as the committee investigates the Epstein case, USA Today reported.

“The committee looks forward to confirming their appearance and remains committed to delivering transparency and accountability for survivors of Epstein’s heinous crimes and for the American people,” Comer said in a statement.

Comer on Aug. 5 sought the Clintons’ testimonies regarding their relationship with former financier and convicted sex offender Epstein, but their attorney asked Nov. 3 that they be allowed to submit a “written proffer of what little information” they have to share, according to the New York Post.

Comer accused the Clintons of demanding the House committee scrap any plans for them to appear before it when responding to the attorney’s request.

The committee chairman also said the attorney admitted the Clintons have relevant information regarding the matter.

“It is precisely the fact President Clinton and Secretary Clinton each maintained relationships with Mr. Epstein and Ms. [Ghislaine]Maxwell in their personal capacities as private citizens that is of interest to the committee,” Comer told the Clintons’ attorney.

Some legal experts have suggested the Clintons could claim executive privilege to avoid testifying before the committee, but others say the relationships they maintained while in their personal capacities would not be subject to executive privilege, according to the New York Post.

Maxwell unlikely to testify

While the Clintons are scheduled to appear before the House committee next month, Politico reported Maxwell has invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if she were brought before the committee.

“I could spend a bunch of taxpayer dollars to send staff and members down there,” Comer said. “If she’s going to plead the Fifth, I don’t know that that’s a good investment.”

Maxwell is imprisoned for 20 years after being convicted on child-sex-trafficking charges in 2022.

Comer subpoenaed her testimony in July, but Maxwell said she only would testify after the appeals she filed regarding her conviction were addressed.

The Supreme Court since has denied her request to reassess her conviction.

Maxwell also has sought immunity against future prosecutions in exchange for her committee testimony, which Comer said will not happen.

She did participate in a two-day deposition with the Justice Department in July and afterward was transferred from a Florida prison to a minimum-security prison in Texas.

FBI, police protect Epstein files storage

The location where the Justice Department’s Epstein investigation files is being guarded after Mark Epstein, brother of Jeffrey, on Tuesday accused the FBI of scrubbing the files of any mention of Republicans while they are being held at its Central Records facility in Winchester, Va., Bloomberg reported.

Mark Epstein claimed a “credible source” told him the files were being doctored, and his claim was shared on social media. Several people suggested protesting the FBI’s Winchester office and possibly seizing the files.

FBI officials deemed such comments to be viable threats against the facility and the files and enhanced its security at the location. Police officers also are protecting Central Records facility officials and staff.

Summers and wife visited Epstein’s island

While the FBI is more closely guarding the Epstein investigation files, The Boston Globe reported that former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and his wife, Elisa New, flew to Epstein’s privately owned Little Saint James island in the U.S. Virgin Islands 10 days after their 2005 wedding.

The trip was part of their extended honeymoon celebration and was a brief visit, Summers’ spokesperson Steven Goldberg.

Summers and New “have repeatedly expressed their regret for having any association with Jeffrey Epstein,” Goldberg said in a statement shared with the Boston newspaper Friday.

“Mr. Summers and Ms. New spent their honeymoon in St. John and Jamaica in December 2005, which was long before Mr. Epstein was arrested for the first time,” Goldberg said.

“As part of that trip, they made a brief visit of less than a day to Mr. Epstein’s island.”

Flight log records indicate Summers and New flew aboard Epstein’s private plane when they traveled from Bedford, Mass., to Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, on Dec. 21, 2005.

They met with Maxwell and Epstein’s personal pilot, Larry Visoski, while on the island and during the same year that Florida investigators began looking into Epstein’s activities.

Despite Epstein’s subsequent arrest and guilty plea to two state charges that resulted in his designation as a sex offender and a year in jail, Summers, who also is a former Harvard University president, continued his friendly relationship with the financier.

That ended when Epstein was arrested in 2019 and later that year hung himself while jailed in New York City.

New also maintained her friendly relationship with Epstein and in 2014 thanked him for a donation that he made to support her academic research as a poetry professor at Harvard.

The financial gift from Epstein was not included in Harvard’s 2020 report regarding his activities involving the university.

New in 2018 also emailed Epstein regarding the novel Lolita, which is about an older man sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl, The Boston Globe reported.

The battle over the files in the investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has reached a new turn with the United States Congress voting for the Department of Justice to release its information on the case. As the world waits for what the full files may reveal, what do we know about the rich and elite who surrounded Epstein?

In recent days, as the United States House of Representatives approached a potential vote about releasing the Epstein files, President Donald Trump pivoted on the hot-button topic.

Trump and members of his administration had sought to undermine efforts to release the files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And Trump has been dismissive of the push to make the files public, calling the case “pretty boring stuff” in July and repeatedly referring to it as a Democratic “hoax.”

Then, on November 16, he told House Republicans to vote in favour of the release.

His shift came after lawmakers cleared a significant hurdle on November 12, netting 218 signatures on a petition to force a vote on a bill to release the files within 30 days. The House is expected to vote on that bill this week. Previously, it was considered unlikely the legislation would pass in the Senate; it remains to be seen whether Trump’s latest statement will cause senators to reconsider.

Epstein moved in the same social circles as Trump in the 1990s, including attending parties at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private Palm Beach, Florida, club. The two were photographed together in social settings multiple times. They later had a falling out, a rift that some reporters dated to late 2007.

Palm Beach County prosecutors investigated Epstein after reports that a 14-year-old girl was molested at his mansion. In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges related to soliciting prostitution from someone under 18. He received preferential treatment during the criminal investigation and served about a year in jail, largely on work release.

In 2018, The Miami Herald published an extensive investigation into the case, and the next year, Epstein was arrested on federal charges for recruiting dozens of underage girls to his New York City mansion and Palm Beach estate from 2002 to 2005 to engage in sex acts for money. He was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell on August 10, 2019, and investigators concluded he died by suicide.

We asked the White House why Trump changed his stance on releasing the files. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement, “President Trump has been consistently calling for transparency related to the Epstein files for years – by releasing tens of thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request” and calling for investigations into “Epstein’s Democrat friends”.

Here’s what Trump has said in 2024 and 2025 about releasing the Epstein files.

While campaigning in 2024, Trump said he would release the files

In June 2024, Fox and Friends co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked Trump if he would declassify various files, including those related to 9/11 and former President John F Kennedy.

“Would you declassify the Epstein files?” Campos-Duffy said.

“Yeah, yeah, I would,” Trump said.

The clip spread on social media, and Trump’s campaign account also shared it.

🚨 President Trump says he will DECLASSIFY the 9/11 Files, JFK Files, and Epstein Files pic.twitter.com/JalLWFkRDZ

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 3, 2024

During the same interview, Trump also said, “I guess I would.” He added, “You don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phoney stuff in there because there is a lot of phoney stuff with that whole world, but I think I would.”

On a September 2024 episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, during a discussion about releasing some of the Epstein documents, Trump said, “Yeah, I’d certainly take a look at it.” He added that he’d be “inclined” to do it and said, “I’d have no problem with it.”

In 2025, Trump was dismissive of the Epstein files

Early in the second Trump administration, Trump officials –  including Attorney General Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, who became the FBI director – said they supported releasing the files.

In late February at a White House event, Bondi released what she called the “first phase” of “declassified Epstein files” to conservative influencers. It largely consisted of documents that had already been made public.

In a July 12 Truth Social post, Trump expressed frustration about the Epstein files. Speaking to reporters on July 15 on the White House lawn, Trump said the files “were made up by Comey. They were made up by Obama. They were made up by Biden.” We rated that claim Pants on Fire.

Trump said the FBI should focus on investigating other issues, such as voter fraud, and that his administration should “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about”.

In a July 16 interview with Real America’s Voice, a conservative outlet, Trump said, “I think in the case of Epstein, they’ve already looked at it and they are looking at it and I think all they have to do is put out anything credible. But you know, that was run by the Biden administration for four years.”

On August 22, a reporter asked Trump if he was in favour of releasing the files.

“I’m in support of keeping it open,” he said. “Innocent people shouldn’t be hurt, but I’m in support of keeping it totally open. I couldn’t care less. You got a lot of people that could be mentioned in those files that don’t deserve to be, people – because he knew everybody in Palm Beach. I don’t know anything about that, but I have said to Pam (Bondi) and everybody else, give them everything you can give them because it’s a Democrat hoax.”

On September 3, a reporter asked Trump a question about efforts to release the Epstein files and if the Justice Department was protecting any friends or donors.

Trump said it was a “Democrat hoax that never ends” and “we’ve given thousands of pages of files”.

This month, Trump called for releasing the files

Trump came out in support of releasing the files after it became clear the House was headed in that direction.

The House Oversight Committee, on November 12, released about 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate.

Trump directed prosecutors to investigate Democrats and told Republicans to vote in favour of releasing the files.

Trump has often noted Epstein’s ties to former President Bill Clinton. In a November 14 Truth Social post, Trump asked the Justice Department to investigate Epstein’s involvement with Clinton.

Typically, prosecutors do not release files during an ongoing investigation, so Trump’s announcement raised questions about whether the Justice Department will withhold certain files even if Congress votes to release them.

When a reporter asked Trump on November 14 about releasing the files, he said, “I don’t care about it, released or not.”

Two days later, in a November 16 post, Trump said, “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party, including our recent Victory on the Democrat ‘Shutdown.’’

Donald Trump “spent hours at my house” and “knew about the girls,” Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier accused of orchestrating sex trafficking of young girls, wrote in private emails House Democrats released Wednesday.

“Of course he knew about the girls,” Epstein said of Trump in an email to author and journalist Michael Wolff in early 2019, when Trump was nearing the end of his first term as President.

After months of political bickering over the well-connected sex offender’s documents, dubbed “the Epstein files,” Democrats on the House Oversight Committee publicly released some of Epstein’s emails to Wolff and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of sex trafficking after Epstein’s death.

The emails are just a small part of a collection of 23,000 documents Epstein’s estate released to the committee and are sure to revive questions about what the president knew about Epstein’s sexual misconduct with girls and young women.

Trump has denied knowing anything about Epstein’s crimes and no investigation has tied Trump to them.

“The more Donald Trump tries to cover up the Epstein files, the more we uncover,” California Democrat Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) said in a statement as he released the documents.

“These latest emails and correspondence raise glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the President,” Garcia added. “The Department of Justice must fully release the Epstein files to the public immediately. The Oversight Committee will continue pushing for answers and will not stop until we get justice for the victims.”

Epstein, 66, died by suicide in a New York jail in August 2019, weeks after he was arrested and federally charged with sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors. A watchdog report released last year found that negligence, misconduct and other failures at the jail contributed to his death.

More than a decade earlier, Epstein evaded federal criminal charges when he struck a plea deal in a south Florida case related to accusations that he molested dozens of girls.

As part of the agreement, Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges, including soliciting prostitution. He registered as a sex offender and served 13 months in jail but was allowed to leave six days a week to work at his office.