Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed on Monday to testify in the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, capitulating to the demands of its Republican chairman days before the House was expected to vote to hold them in criminal contempt of Congress.
For months, the Clintons had been adamant that they would not comply with subpoenas from Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the panel’s Republican chairman, whom they have described as invalid and legally unenforceable.
They accused Mr. Comer of being part of a plot to target them as President Trump’s political adversaries and promised to fight him on the issue for as long as it took.
But after some Democrats on the panel joined Republicans in a vote to recommend charging them with criminal contempt, an extraordinary first step in referring them to the Justice Department for prosecution, the Clintons ultimately waved the white flag and agreed to fully comply with Mr. Comer’s demands.
In an email sent to Mr. Comer on Monday evening, attorneys for the Clintons said their clients would “appear for depositions on mutually agreeable dates” and asked that the House not move forward with a contempt vote, which had been slated for Wednesday.
“They negotiated in good faith. You did not,” spokesmen for the Clintons said in a statement. “They told under oath what they know, but you did not care. But the former president and former secretary of state will be there.”
For Mr. Clinton to testify in the Epstein investigation would be nearly unprecedented. No former president has appeared before Congress since 1983, when President Gerald R. Ford did so to discuss the celebration of the 1987 bicentennial of the enactment of the Constitution.
When Mr. Trump was subpoenaed in 2022 by the select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, after he had left office, he sued the panel to try to block it. The panel ultimately withdrew the subpoena.
The Clintons’ move capped a months-long battle between them and Mr. Comer. It was a victory for the Republican chairman’s efforts to shift the focus of his panel’s Epstein investigation away from Mr. Trump’s ties to Mr. Epstein and his administration’s handling of the matter and onto prominent Democrats who once associated with the disgraced financier and his longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell.
In a letter to Mr. Comer on Saturday, obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Clinton’s lawyers tried one more time to put guardrails on potential interviews with the Clintons. They said that Mr. Clinton would agree to sit for a four-hour transcribed interview with the entire committee, something he had previously described as an inappropriate and unprecedented request to make of a former president.
The lawyers asked that Mrs. Clinton, who has said she never met or spoke to Mr. Epstein, be allowed to make a sworn declaration instead of testifying. But they said that she, too, would submit to an in-person interview if the committee insisted on it, “with appropriate adjustments for the paucity of information she has to offer in this matter,” according to the letter.
But Mr. Comer flatly rejected the offer, calling it “unreasonable” and arguing that four hours of testimony from Mr. Clinton was inadequate given that he was a “loquacious individual” who might seek to run out the clock.
“Your clients’ desire for special treatment is both frustrating and an affront to the American people’s desire for transparency,” Mr. Comer wrote in a letter to the Clintons’ lawyers on Monday that was also obtained by The New York Times.
In that letter, Mr. Comer also rejected the demand from Mr. Clinton that the scope of the interview be limited to matters related to Mr. Epstein. Mr. Comer said the former president “likely has an artificially narrow definition in mind” of what matters would be related to the Epstein investigation.
Mr. Comer said he had concerns that Mr. Clinton would refuse to answer questions about “his personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, ways in which they sought to curry favor with powerful individuals, and alleged efforts to utilize his power and influence after his presidency to kill negative news stories about Jeffrey Epstein.”
In response to Mr. Comer’s letter, the Clintons on Monday evening agreed to all of Mr. Comer’s demands, removing any time limit on the deposition of Mr. Clinton or on the range of topics that Republicans could ask him about.
The only point of negotiation that Mr. Comer had previously been amenable to was conducting the interviews in New York, where the Clintons live and work.
Mr. Clinton was acquainted with Mr. Epstein, who died in prison in 2019, but has said he never visited Mr. Epstein’s private island and cut off contact with him two decades ago. Mr. Clinton took four international trips on Mr. Epstein’s private jet in 2002 and 2003, according to flight logs.
