Residence Oversight to depose Ghislaine Maxwell on Feb. 9
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WASHINGTON — Residence Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., said Wednesday that his panel is situation to depose Ghislaine Maxwell on Feb. 9 as portion of its investigation into the unhurried convicted sex culprit Jeffrey Epstein.
“We need to hear from Ghislaine Maxwell,” Comer said about Epstein’s co-conspirator and primitive female friend, who was convicted on sex trafficking costs and sentenced in 2022 to twenty years in jail.
“We’ve been trying to get her in for a deposition, and her lawyers have been saying that she’s going to plead the Fifth, but we have nailed down a date, Feb. 9, where Maxwell will be deposed by this committee,” he added.
Comer didn’t portion details referring to the deposition, which a source accustomed to the planning said will most doubtless be performed almost. Maxwell is serving her sentence at a minimum-security federal jail camp in Texas. She was transferred there closing one year after having been held at a low-security facility in Florida.
Maxwell’s licensed first rate, David Oscar Markus, wrote in a letter to Comer on Tuesday that if the committee proceeds with its deposition, “Ms. Maxwell will invoke her privilege against self-incrimination and decline to answer questions.”
“That is not a negotiating position or a tactical choice; it is a legal necessity,” wrote Markus, who notorious within the letter that Maxwell’s “post-conviction litigation is far from over.” He added, “Testimony under oath while a habeas petition is pending would risk irreparable prejudice to her constitutional claims and expose her to further criminal jeopardy.”
Markus argued that continuing with a deposition below these conditions would consequence in “pure political theater” and would be “a complete waste” of taxpayer dollars.
“The only certainty is a public spectacle in which a witness repeatedly invokes the Fifth Amendment,” he said.
The committee was within the beginning scheduled to depose Maxwell in August, but the deposition was postponed. Comer had said her testimony is “indispensable to the Committee’s efforts referring to Mr. Jeffrey Epstein, including the 2007 non-prosecution settlement and the conditions surrounding Mr. Epstein’s loss of life.” Maxwell’s lawyers said at that time that she would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights unless the committee granted her immunity.
After the deposition was delayed, Comer said the panel would consider its next steps after the Supreme Court determined whether or no longer it would review Maxwell’s conviction as a sex culprit. In early October, the high court within the discontinuance rejected her shy away to the felony conviction.
As for the Clintons, the committee voted Wednesday afternoon to recommend holding them in contempt of Congress after they every failed to appear for depositions on Capitol Hill closing week. Their attorneys argued that the subpoenas were “legally invalid.”
The former president appeared in numerous pictures that were part of the first batch of Epstein files the Justice Department released in December. Clinton’s spokesman Angel Ureña has said he had flown on Epstein’s airplane for Clinton Foundation trips within the early 2000s, sooner than Epstein was charged with any sex crimes. Clinton has denied any wrongdoing and has said he was unaware of Epstein’s crimes. He has said he reduce again ties with Epstein sooner than he was accused in 2006 of getting sex with a minor.
Ureña wrote in a reveal Wednesday on X that every Clintons had nothing to compose with Epstein “for bigger than twenty years.”
“The Committee is balloting whether or no longer to ticket the Clintons with a crime that would also consequence of their imprisonment. However we now absorb cooperated,” he said. “They shining received’t enlighten you we now absorb because then they might be able to not ticket them.”
Rebecca Shabad is a politics reporter for NBC News based in Washington.
Chloe Atkins reports for the NBC News National Security and Law Unit, based in New York.
