Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro served jail time for defying a Congressional subpoena. Bill and Hillary Clinton are about to find out if that same standard applies to them.
On January 13, Fox News reported:
Former President Bill Clinton appears to have defied a congressional subpoena to appear before the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday morning.
Clinton was compelled to sit for a sworn closed-door deposition in the House’s bipartisan probe into Jeffrey Epstein, but Fox News Digital did not see him before or after the scheduled 10 a.m. grilling.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., had threatened to begin contempt of Congress proceedings against Clinton if he did not appear Tuesday.
Comer said Tuesday morning, “We will move next week in the House Oversight Committee … to hold Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress.”
The article notes:
The Clintons’ attorneys tore into Comer’s leadership of the investigation, accusing him of violating the Constitution’s separation of powers and trying to obfuscate the search for real information.
“President and Secretary Clinton have already provided the limited information they possess about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to the Committee. They did so proactively and voluntarily, and despite the fact that the Subpoenas are invalid and legally unenforceable, untethered to a valid legislative purpose, unwarranted because they do not seek pertinent information, and an unprecedented infringement on the separation of powers,” the letter said.
“Your continued insistence that the former President and Secretary of State can be compelled to appear before the Committee under these circumstances, however, brings us toward a protracted and unnecessary legal confrontation that distracts from the principal work of the Congress with respect to this matter, which, if conducted sincerely, could help ensure the victims of Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell are afforded some measure of justice for the crimes perpetrated against them, however late. But perhaps distraction is the point.”
I believe that the excuse that President Clinton used during the Monica Lewinsky scandal was that he needed to focus on running the country. I expect to hear similar excuses from the Clintons in the near future.