Forcing Bill Clinton to answer questions in the Jeffrey Epstein probe will backfire on Republicans, House Democrats warned Friday, indicating they would haul in Donald and Melania Trump if they return to power on Capitol Hill.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, said the Republicans’ actions have cleared the way for Democrats to demand the Trumps’ testimony on their connections to the late convicted sex offender.
“Republicans have now set a new precedent, which is to bring in presidents and former presidents to testify,” Garcia told reporters in Chappaqua, NY, ahead of the 42nd president’s deposition.
“So we’re once again going to make that call that we did yesterday — we are now asking and demanding that President Trump officially come in and testify in front of the Oversight Committee.”
Garcia told CNN earlier Friday that he wasn’t ruling out a subpoena for first lady Melania Trump either.
“House Republicans have set a new precedent, and that new precedent now includes bringing in for depositions presidents, former presidents, and first ladies, and then asking those first ladies, as they did yesterday, about how their husbands felt and about what their husbands were doing,” he said.
Garcia is in line to become chairman of the Oversight panel if Democrats win the House majority in the November midterm elections, as they are widely expected to do.
“We now want President Trump to come in and to testify under oath in front of the Oversight Committee. We want the first lady, who we know had a relationship as well with Jeffrey Epstein, to come in under oath and testify to the Oversight Committee. That is the new precedent that Republicans wanted to set here,” he said.
“We’re going to have a very long list of people, anyone that we believe had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that, on day one, will have a subpoena from our committee.”
Here’s the latest on the release of the Epstein files
- DOJ says it has released less than 1% of Epstein files, with more than 2 million documents under review
- Bill and Hillary Clinton face contempt of Congress for dodging on Epstein subpoenas again
- Rage as California lawmaker spared jail for felony child abuse due to ‘Epstein loophole’: official
- DOJ ‘working around the clock’ on Epstein files release, with millions of pages left to review
Melania Trump appears in several photographs with Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, dating back to the days when she was dating her now-husband in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Neither the president nor the first lady has been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, who was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
Bill Clinton’s closed-door deposition on Friday marked the first time a former US president had been compelled to testify before Congress.
Other presidents have testified voluntarily — including Gerald Ford, who spoke to lawmakers under oath in 1974 about his controversial pardon of Richard Nixon. Nixon himself was subpoenaed by Congress to discuss the Watergate scandal, but ultimately didn’t testify.
President Trump expressed some sympathy for Clinton Friday, telling reporters at the White House: “I don’t seeing him deposed, but you know, they certainly went after me a lot more than that … Look, I like him and I don’t like seeing him deposed.”
Trump has previously expressed concerns about what Democrats will do if they win the midterms, warning his supporters he could face a “third impeachment.”
