{"id":196832,"date":"2026-01-14T02:34:47","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T02:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/house-gop-seeks-to-hold-bill-clinton-in-contempt-for-skipping-epstein-deposition-nbc-news\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T02:34:47","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T02:34:47","slug":"house-gop-seeks-to-hold-bill-clinton-in-contempt-for-skipping-epstein-deposition-nbc-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/house-gop-seeks-to-hold-bill-clinton-in-contempt-for-skipping-epstein-deposition-nbc-news\/","title":{"rendered":"House GOP seeks to hold Bill Clinton in contempt for skipping Epstein deposition – NBC News"},"content":{"rendered":"

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WASHINGTON \u2014 The Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced Tuesday that it will seek to hold former President Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress<\/a> after he failed to appear for a deposition as part of the panel’s probe into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein<\/a>.
House Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., said that because Clinton decided not to show up \u201cfor his lawful subpoena,\u201d the panel would vote on holding him in contempt next week.
\u201cWe\u2019ve communicated with President Clinton\u2019s legal team for months now, giving them opportunity after opportunity, to come in, to give us a day, and they continue to delay, delay, delay to the point where we had no idea whether they\u2019re going to show up today or not,” Comer said. “I think it\u2019s very disappointing.\u201d
The committee had scheduled a deposition with Clinton for Tuesday morning, as well as a deposition with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Wednesday, as a result of subpoenas issued last year.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters Monday night that it \u201cwould be contempt of Congress\u201d if the Clintons did not attend this week\u2019s depositions.
In a letter to Comer, the Clintons said they didn’t plan to appear for the scheduled depositions, arguing that the subpoenas are \u201clegally invalid\u201d and citing legal analysis prepared by two law firms that they said were provided to the committee Monday.
\u201cEvery person has to decide when they have seen or had enough and are ready to fight for this country, its principles and its people, no matter the consequences,\u201d the Clintons wrote. \u201cFor us, now is that time.\u201d
They also addressed the prospect of the committee voting to hold them in contempt.
\u201cWe expect you will direct your committee to seek to hold us in contempt,\u201d the Clintons wrote, adding, \u201cYou will say it is not our decision to make. But we have made it. Now you have to make yours.\u201d
“Despite everything that needs to be done to help our country, you are on the cusp of bringing Congress to a halt to pursue a rarely used process literally designed to result in our imprisonment,” they wrote. “This is not the way out of America’s ills, and we will forcefully defend ourselves.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., an Oversight Committee member who led a bipartisan push to force a floor vote<\/a> on the release of the Epstein files last year, told NBC News that Clinton should appear for testimony.
“I have always said that this needs to be transparent,” Khanna said Tuesday. “Everyone involved should be providing an explanation, and I have conducted this in a way that doesn\u2019t single out Republicans or Democrats.”
“If Democrats are implicated, then so be it,” he added.
Other House Democrats who spoke with NBC News, like Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, did not go as far.
Goldman called Comer’s subpoena of the former president “absolutely absurd.”
“This is a distraction,” he said.
Comer subpoenaed the Clintons to appear for depositions<\/a> for testimony related to the former president’s relationship with Epstein. The committee originally scheduled the couple’s depositions for last October.
“No one\u2019s accused of Bill Clinton of any wrongdoing,” Comer said in his remarks Tuesday morning. “We just have questions.”
In December, Comer said he would postpone the depositions for a second time because the Clintons needed to attend a funeral, but he said the Clintons’ lawyer, David Kendall, was \u201cunwilling to provide any alternative dates” for their testimony, so he was setting the depositions for mid-January.
Clinton’s spokesperson, Angel Ure\u00f1a, said of Comer in December, \u201cFor months, we\u2019ve been offering the same exact thing he accepted from the rest, but he refuses and won\u2019t explain why,\u201d apparently referring to the committee’s acceptance of written statements, rather than in-person depositions, from some other former government officials, including former U.S. attorneys general. “Make of that what you will,” Ure\u00f1a added.
Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, Nick Merrill, also said in statement last month, \u201cSince this started, we\u2019ve been asking what the hell Hillary Clinton has to do with this, and he hasn\u2019t been able to come up with an answer.”
The first set of Epstein files released by the Justice Department in December<\/a> contained numerous pictures of Clinton<\/a>, who Ure\u00f1a said had flown on Epstein\u2019s plane for Clinton Foundation trips in the early 2000s, before Epstein was charged with any sex crimes. There were a series of undated pictures, for example, with Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, and what looked like a trip to Thailand. It’s unclear when the photos were taken.
Clinton has denied any wrongdoing and has said he was unaware of Epstein\u2019s crimes. He has said that he cut ties with Epstein before Epstein was accused in 2006 of having sex with a minor. Ure\u00f1a said in December that all photos and references to Clinton in the government\u2019s files should be released.
Ure\u00f1a said<\/a> in a post on X after the release that the \u201cWhite House hasn\u2019t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton. This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they\u2019ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn\u2019t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be.\u201d
Before the files were publicly released, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair <\/a>that she had read the Epstein case file and said Trump “was wrong\u201d to suggest that there was anything incriminating <\/strong>about Clinton in the records.
The Justice Department has said it is still reviewing millions of pages of files “potentially” related to Epstein for possible release.
Kyle Stewart is a producer and off-air reporter covering Congress for NBC News, managing coverage of the House.
Brennan Leach is an associate producer for NBC News covering the Senate.
Rebecca Shabad is a politics reporter for NBC News based in Washington.
Monica Alba is a White House correspondent for NBC News.
© 2026 NBCUniversal Media, LLC<\/p>\n

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news AlertsThere are no new alerts at this timeWASHINGTON \u2014 The Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced Tuesday that it will seek to hold former President Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress after he failed to appear for a deposition as part of the panel’s probe into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.House Oversight Chair […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":196833,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-196832","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}