The Democrat who launched the effort by Congress to obtain the Epstein files warned his Republican counterparts on Sunday that the House Oversight Committee’s efforts to compel the testimony of Bill and Hillary Clinton would only serve their purposes for so long.
Ro Khanna, a California representative who co-sponsored the discharge petition to force the Department of Justice to publish the files, made the comments Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Khanna told NBC’s Kristen Welker that Republicans scored a short-term political victory by forcing the Clintons back into the headlines this past week with their closed-door testimonies to the committee, but asserted that it would blow up in the GOP’s faces when Donald Trump was eventually called before the committee to provide his own testimony under questioning from Democrats.
“A new precedent has been set in America today. Before this, we had the Trump rule. Trump defied, as all of you know, a congressional subpoena with the Jan. 6 committee. He said, ‘Presidents don’t have to testify,’” Khanna said.
The congressman went on: “Now we have the Clinton rule, which is that presidents and their families have to testify when Congress issues a subpoena, and that means that Donald Trump needs to come before our committee and explain what he knew about Epstein.”
Whether or not the committee will actually be successful in forcing the president to testify is another matter entirely. Congress has no power to enforce its subpoenas beyond asking the Justice Department, headed by Trump appointee Pam Bondi, for support. The Oversight panel and broader House of Representatives are unlikely to vote against Trump on the matter unless the chamber returns to Democratic hands.
In 2022, the committee investigating the January 6 attack subpoenaed Trump for testimony and documents related to the attack on Congress that left dozens of police officers injured and members of the House and Senate hiding from a mob. Trump’s lawyers stonewalled for months, and the committee eventually withdrew its subpoena after wrapping up its investigation.
The Trump legal team’s delay tactics mirrored the strategies used in legal cases brought against the president after his exit from the presidency in 2021, including two investigations into his efforts to remain in power and change the results of the presidential election. In those cases, too, Trump was successful in evading prosecution as the court cases were nullified by his 2024 election victory.
Now, Trump faces a very different challenge: Widespread continued public speculation and intrigue surrounding the investigation(s) into Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile and billionaire financier known for cultivating friendships and close business relationships with powerful men across the globe, including Trump. The death of Epstein in 2019, while in federal custody, surged interest in his case and allegations that he was involving his influential friends in a child sex trafficking ring he operated with the help of his girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell remains in prison for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors.
Despite the promises of many figures in Trumpworld to publicize the government’s trove of evidence collected about Epstein and his sex trafficking ring and the enthusiasm such individuals as Vice President JD Vance showed for stoking that speculation before winning the election, Trump’s Department of Justice rejected calls to publish the entirety of the documents last year.
Congress acted, and a petition led by Khanna and Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican, gained bipartisan support and culminated in the most significant rebellion against Trump committed by the congressional GOP in 2025. The bill was begrudgingly signed into law by the president, who has urged his followers to cease their interest in the files.
Former President Clinton, who was known to have a friendship and professional relationship with the billionaire child sex trafficker before Epstein was first convicted of his crimes in 2008 and his activities became public knowledge, testified before the Oversight committee this past week. So did Hillary Clinton, his wife and Trump’s foe from the 2016 presidential election. The former president knocked Republicans for asking his wife to testify, while Hillary Clinton reportedly got into a heated verbal exchange with Rep. Lauren Boebert, a far-right Republican on the panel.
Trump himself is said to be mentioned in the files more than a “million” times, according to one Democratic representative, and has admitted that his own relationship with Epstein soured after Epstein hired away Virginia Giuffre, one of his victims, from her previous employment at Mar-a-Lago.
