Those Nine Democrats Were Wrong to Vote the Clintons in Contempt

It’s no great surprise that the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Reform voted Wednesday to hold the Clintons in contempt of Congress for their refusal to be deposed about their relationship to the pedophile and sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump-dominated GOP routinely leverages government police powers to punish political enemies. In the previous Congress, the Republican House majority created a Select Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee “on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” and today’s Justice Department includes a “Weaponization Working Group” chaired by the MAGA hack Ed Martin. Martin is also in charge of the department’s less-than-scrupulous pardon review, which (according to NBC News) favors white-collar criminals convicted of money laundering, bank fraud, and wire fraud.

What’s surprising is that no fewer than nine committee Democrats supported the contempt resolution. They are: Representatives Maxwell Frost of Florida, Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, Emily Randall of Washington, Lateefah Simon of California, Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Stephen Lynch and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. Two other Democrats, Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Dave Min of California, voted “present.” Three of these nine—Lee, Stansbury, and Tlaib—also voted to hold Hillary Clinton in contempt, with Min again voting “present.” That’s 11 Democrats unwilling to oppose a contempt resolution that even the Wall Street Journal editorial page (which during Clinton’s time in office published no fewer than six volumes about the Whitewater scandal) says is not “a great use of Congress’s time.”

Look, I get it. These members, mostly younger and progressive, don’t want to make excuses for Clinton’s sexual relationship with a White House intern. As Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist, told The Wall Street Journal: “I don’t think we are in a space as a party where there is any desire to do any coverup for the poor decisions of past generations.… Democrats have turned the page on folks who operated like that.”

But Hillary Clinton, who has no #MeToo scandals in her past, shouldn’t be dragged into this conversation at all. Yes, her husband behaved very badly with Monica Lewinsky. I called on him at the time to resign, in The New Republic (“Sweet Good-Bye,” September 1998). My late first wife, Marjorie Williams, published a Vanity Fair piece four months earlier calling out feminists for taking a dive on Monicagate.

These Democrats are welcome to critique their elders’ past sins. But their more urgent business is to examine seriously the Republican majority’s substantive rationale for holding the Clintons in contempt of Congress. It’s laughably weak.

“You subpoenaed eight people in addition to us,” the Clintons wrote the committee’s Republican chairman, James Comer of Kentucky. “You dismissed seven of those eight without any of them saying a single word to you.” A committee report on the matter confirms that: 10 subpoenas went out in August. The other eight all went to former attorneys general or former FBI directors. Of them, only former Attorney General William Barr was deposed. The others’ subpoenas were dismissed either because they “affirmed in writing … that they lacked any information relevant to the investigation” (more or less as the Clintons did) or because, in unspecified cases, they “had serious health issues that prevented their testimony.” Alex Acosta, who was labor secretary during Trump’s first term, appeared for what the committee report describes as a “transcribed interview” (i.e., not a deposition) to discuss his handling of an earlier bungled prosecution against Epstein. But that was entirely voluntary.

An eleventh subpoena was sent earlier, in July, to Ghislaine Maxwell, an actual principal in the Epstein case. But Maxwell’s lawyers said she’d take the Fifth without immunity, which the committee refused to grant, so Comer dropped that too. But on January 21, Comer changed his mind, announcing that Maxwell will be deposed from prison after all, on February 9. Her lawyers still say she’s going to take the Fifth.

The Oversight Committee is now preparing subpoenas for three Epstein associates—the retail billionaire and Epstein mentor Leslie Wexner, Epstein’s personal lawyer Darren Indyke, and Epstein’s accountant Richard Kahn—though these haven’t yet been issued. If Wexner, Indyke, and Kahn don’t take the Fifth, they ought to have plenty to say. A serious Epstein investigation would have deposed them well before it sought to depose the Clintons. But a serious investigation would probably turn up information about Epstein’s close friendship with Donald Trump through the mid-aughts. If Wexner, Indyke, and Kahn confound Comer by actually agreeing to talk, that will likely happen.

“We have tried to give you the little information we had,” the Clintons wrote Comer. “To answer your inquiry, we are providing you with the same or more than seven of the other eight individuals you subpoenaed” in August. Including Maxwell, the Clintons have provided the same or more than eight of these nine others.

What does the Oversight Committee think the Clintons have to tell? In the case of Hillary, there’s nothing. As for Bill, the former president wrote in an emailed declaration, in lieu of the scheduled January 13 deposition, that yes, he had a relationship with Epstein prior to 2009. (Epstein struck a sweetheart plea agreement with Acosta in December 2007, but that remained secret for some time.) Clinton also wrote that, yes, he flew on Epstein’s plane on multiple occasions.

The committee says it’s interested in Virginia Giuffre’s allegation (in an email to Sharon Churcher of The Daily Mail) that Clinton “walked into [Vanity Fair] and threatened them not to write sex-trafficing [sic] articles about his good friend [Jeffrey Epstein].” Where Giuffre would have gotten such information is anybody’s guess; Vanity Fair’s then editor, Graydon Carter, told The Telegraph, “That categorically did not happen.” Before deposing a former president, why doesn’t the Oversight Committee depose Carter?

The committee also wants to know about a photograph of Clinton receiving a massage from the Epstein accuser Chauntae Davies. That’s interesting only if you haven’t seen the photograph. It’s here. Clinton is sitting in a chair, and Davies is working his stiff neck, at Clinton’s request (“Would you mind giving it a crack?). Both are fully clothed. Davies later said, “President Clinton was a perfect gentleman during the trip and I saw absolutely no foul play involving him.” Does the committee think Davies might be lying? Then before deposing a former president, why not depose Davies?

The committee wants to know whether Clinton ever visited Epstein’s famous private island, Little Saint James (which, as a sidebar to the Trump-Greenland story, was one of about 60 Caribbean islands Denmark sold to the United States back in 1917; it hasn’t sold us any since). In a December 2020 interview with Vanity Fair, Clinton’s estranged former aide Doug Band said Clinton visited the island in January 2003. But there’s absolutely no record of this, and everybody else, including Clinton, says he never went there. Before deposing a former president, why not depose Band, the one person who says he did?

The Daily Beast reported in September 2022 that in 2014, Clinton had dinner in Los Angeles with Maxwell. The committee report and The Daily Beast both hyped this smuttily as an “intimate dinner,” but others were present, including Clinton’s entourage. Before deposing a former president, why not ask Maxwell, or, if she won’t talk, another attendee?

I have now enumerated every single reason the Oversight Committee has given to depose both Bill and Hillary Clinton.

I’m no great fan of executive privilege, a concept that the non-lawyer President Dwight Eisenhower pulled out of his ass to avoid getting enmeshed in the Army-McCarthy hearings. But I do respect precedent. Presidents and ex-presidents have furnished documents in response to subpoenas, but they have never agreed to be deposed formally by Congress under subpoena. Instead, they’ve made on various occasions voluntary arrangements to give testimony, as the Clintons are offering to do in this instance.

But Comer won’t take yes for an answer. That was evident in a surreal exchange before the contempt vote between Comer and Representative Melanie Stansbury, Democrat of New Mexico. Stansbury asked Comer whether it was true the Clintons were “offering to do this on the record, with you, with the staff, with the attorneys. Is that correct?”

Comer: I didn’t—I wasn’t paying attention to your question.

Stansbury: OK, we’re here pursuant to a motion you brought for contempt. And the claim is that you have made reasonable accommodations and that [the Clintons] have not been responsive. But they have transmitted correspondence to all of the members of the committee … including a letter from their attorneys stating that they have offered … to meet with you on the record with the staff to give sworn statements. Is that correct?

Comer: We, we have negotiated …

Stansbury: Yes or no?

Comer: You all are trying to create a false narrative. You had five months. You should have gotten to the Clintons before the contempt vote.

Stansbury: All I’m asking you is, is that true?

After a little more petty obfuscation from Comer, Stansbury asked him again and was met with silence.

Stansbury: Just to be clear for the public, his staffer [is] advising the chairman to not answer the question.

Comer: No, the staff said they couldn’t understand what you were saying because you’ve blabbered for three minutes.

I encourage you to watch the whole exchange, which begins around 3:40:57. Stansbury was an inspiration. Comer was an embarrassment. So are Stansbury’s nine colleagues who voted for his contempt resolution.

If the details described above don’t interest you, consider the sheer hypocrisy of it. Comer, the Clintons note in their letter, was “silent when the sitting President took the same position, as a president, barely more than three years ago.” That was when Trump refused to show up for a deposition before the select committee on the January 6, 2021, riot. He had no interest in reaching an informal accommodation. In a similar spirit, the Oversight Committee will never ask Trump to answer any questions about Epstein voluntarily. Unlike with Clinton, there’s no shortage of such questions. For starters: What did that birthday card, the one with Trump’s deft drawing of a nude woman (“May every day be a wonderful secret”), actually mean?

Let’s hope the Democrats’ nine votes to hold the Clintons in contempt vanish when this resolution comes to the House floor. They’re betraying not their party but justice, common sense, and good faith. Leave that to the Republicans.