Key points
- White House faces intense demands to be more transparent
- Justice Department angered Trump supporters when it confirmed Epstein died by suicide
- Trump has urged his supporters to drop demands for the Epstein files
ISLAMABAD: United States (US) lawmakers on Tuesday subpoenaed former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for testimony on Jeffrey Epstein, in a major escalation of the controversy surrounding the investigation into the notorious sex offender.
The Clintons were among multiple former Democratic and Republican government officials — as well as the Justice Department — targeted by investigators reviewing the handling of the disgraced financier’s case after he died in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.
Intense demands
House investigators also issued a subpoena to Attorney General Pam Bondi for documents related to the Justice Department’s investigation into Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his associate who is serving a 20-year prison sentence, according to CBS News.
The White House has been facing increasingly intense demands to be more transparent after the Justice Department angered Trump supporters — many of whom believe Epstein was murdered in a cover-up — when it confirmed last month that he had died by suicide in his prison cell and that his case was effectively closed.
“Client list”
The department also said Epstein had no secret “client list” — rebuffing conspiracy theories held by Trump’s far-right supporters about supposedly high-level Democratic complicity.
Trump has urged his supporters to drop demands for the Epstein files, but Democrats in the Republican-led Congress — with some support from majority lawmakers — have also been seeking a floor vote to force their release.
“By your own admission, you flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane four separate times in 2002 and 2003,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer wrote to former president Clinton.
“During one of these trips, you were even pictured receiving a ‘massage’ from one of Mr. Epstein’s victims.”
Uproar
The White House has been seeking to redirect public attention from uproar over its handling of the affair with a series of headline-grabbing announcements including baseless claims that former president Barack Obama headed a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump.
Epstein was for years a friend and associate of Trump and numerous high-profile people before he was convicted of sex crimes and then imprisoned pending trial for allegedly trafficking underage girls, according to AFP.
His death supercharged a conspiracy theory long promoted by Trump supporters that Epstein had run an international pedophile ring and that elites wanted to make sure he never revealed their secrets.
After Trump returned to power in January, his administration promised to release Epstein case files.
Past relationship
When Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on July 7 that she had nothing to release, Republicans were furious — and Trump has attempted to control the scandal ever since.
The case got even more complicated for the president after a Wall Street Journal report that he had written a lewd birthday letter to Epstein in 2003. Trump denies this and has sued the Journal.
The Journal then dropped a separate story, saying Bondi had informed Trump in May that his name appeared several times in the Epstein files, even if there was no indication of wrongdoing.
Other officials targeted by the Oversight Committee include former FBI director James Comey, former special counsel Robert Mueller and ex-attorney generals Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, Merrick Garland, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, and Alberto Gonzales.
