Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr sat for a closed-door deposition Monday as the first witness called in the House Oversight Committee’s bipartisan investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Barr served as attorney general twice — under George H.W. Bush and in Donald Trump’s first administration.
In addition to Barr, the Oversight Committee earlier this month issued subpoenas for depositions to Bill and Hillary Clinton, former FBI directors James Comey and Robert Mueller, and former attorneys general Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, Merrick Garland, Jeff Sessions and Alberto Gonzales for “testimony related to horrific crimes perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein.”
MORE: Hunter Biden escalates rift with Melania Trump over Jeffrey Epstein allegation
During a break in questioning, Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., told reporters that Barr, who was attorney general when Epstein was found dead in his prison cell Aug 10, 2019, has been cooperative with committee investigators.
“Attorney General Barr is answering every question, and I think that he’s being very transparent. That’s our goal with this investigation, is to be transparent,” Comer said.
Comer also told reporters that Barr testified that he did not know anything about a “client list” and that President Donald Trump is not criminally implicated in the Epstein files.
Epstein, whose private island estate was in the U.S. Virgin Islands, has long been rumored to have kept a “client list” of celebrities and politicians, which right-wing influencers have baselessly accused authorities of hiding.
Multiple sources have told ABC News that no such client list exists.
“What Attorney General Barr testified in there was that he never had conversations with President Trump pertaining to a client list,” Comer said. “He didn’t know anything about a client list. He said that he had never seen anything that would implicate President Trump in any of this, and that he believed, if there had been anything pertaining to President Trump, with respect to the Epstein list, that he felt like the Biden administration would have probably leaked it out. And I think that’s pretty much conventional wisdom among anyone that’s practical in this.”
Comer laid out some of the additional questioning posed to Barr.
“People want to know the truth about Epstein island. They want to know who was involved. Was the government involved? Did the government know about it? And I think Attorney General Barr’s shed a lot of light with respect to his knowledge of it. And hopefully we’ll bring in Merrick Garland and others and find out more.”
Those subpoenas follow Comer’s subpoena for the Department of Justice to produce its full, unredacted Epstein file by Tuesday, Aug. 19.
Comer told ABC News that he is engaged in “really good” conversations with the DOJ to comply with his subpoena, but he signaled the agency will miss Tuesday’s deadline.
MORE: Judge rejects Trump administration’s request to unseal grand jury testimony in Ghislaine Maxwell case
“You have to understand how many, you can imagine, how many documents there are,” Comer said. “I think that we’re going to have the — I think we’ll receive the documents very soon. They’re compiling everything together. I think we’re working together in a good faith effort, and everything’s coming along. I expect to receive the documents very, very soon.”
The Trump administration has been dealing with the fallout from its decision not to release materials related to the investigation into Epstein, the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who died by suicide in jail in 2019, following the blowback it received from MAGA supporters after it announced last month that no additional files would be released.
The Justice Department and FBI announced last month that they had found no evidence that Epstein kept a client list, after several top officials, before joining the administration, had themselves accused the government of shielding information regarding the Epstein case.
