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James Comer

"Transparency"? Why Republican Comer Won't Let The Clintons Testify In Public

Under Republican control, the aims of the House Oversight Committee are to promote partisan narratives rather than to reveal facts and advance public understanding of national issues. Rep. James Comer (R-KY), its chairman, has displayed that routinely self-serving approach in the committee’s “investigation” of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal – and especially in his zeal to subpoena Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Comer was never among the tiny handful of Republicans who demanded that the Trump administration release the government’s files on the deceased sex predator. Instead, the plodding Comer dutifully followed Donald Trump’s lead in defecting public anger over the case. Focusing on the Clintons, who know little (Bill) or nothing (Hillary) about this matter, is exactly how Trump has handled his own troubling connections with Epstein for the past several years.

With tens of thousands of mentions of Trump in the released Epstein materials, that distraction is more urgent than ever. And the Clintons somehow remain enticing targets for politicians like Comer and even some of the Democrats on his committee.

But after resisting the subpoenas for months – until it became clear that a vote to hold them in contempt would pass the House – the Clintons have flipped Comer’s script. Rather than give depositions behind closed doors, as the Republicans evidently prefer, the former president and secretary of state have demanded that the committee question them in a public hearing.

On February 5, Hillary Clinton posted this challenge on X:

“For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath,” she wrote. “They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction.”

In a follow-up post, she urged Comer to “stop the games.”

“If you want this fight, @RepJamesComer, let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”

Comer is not about to accept that challenge, which he ignored.

First, he knows how that worked out when Hillary Clinton showed up to testify about the Benghazi terror attack for 11 hours, at the behest of his predecessor, former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) – in short, not well for Gowdy and the Republicans, who made themselves look stupid as Clinton briskly schooled them. It’s not at all clear that Comer, a simpleton often mocked in whispers by his fellow Republicans, would fare better against both Clintons.

Second, Comer is obviously planning to pursue the devious strategy that proved more successful for Gowdy during the Benghazi farce – to record the depositions and then selectively leak snippets that create a misleading impression of the testimony. That is how Gowdy abused Sidney Blumenthal, the journalist and former Clinton White House aide called to testify privately for nine hours during that inquest in 2015.

I wrote extensively about that clown show – and the complicity that Gowdy enjoyed from the New York Times Washington bureau, which eagerly lapped up the leaks – in a series of posts. Gowdy and his stooges fabricated a tale about Blumenthal’s supposed “business interests” in Libya and how they had influenced Clinton’s policy. Having invented that diverting story, the Republicans could not afford to let the public see and hear Blumenthal’s testimony demolishing it.

So despite protests from Democrats, notably the late and highly esteemed Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), a much sturdier figure than the current ranking Democrat, Blumenthal’s testimony was kept under wraps – where it remains a decade later. Neither Gowdy nor his fellow Republicans wanted the public to see how they had misused their power to spread falsehoods, pursue partisan grudges unrelated to Benghazi, and generally make fools of themselves.

Will House Democrats, the Epstein victims, and the media allow Comer to get away with the same game? For all their rhetoric about “transparency,” not to mention similar high-minded blather from the Republicans, why would they permit this nonsense?

This attempt to conceal and distort the Clintons’ testimony is the latest episode in the ongoing Trump coverup – and it would be shameful indeed to allow such a deception to proceed.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, will be published in February 2026.

Reprinted with permission from Creators

Donald Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell

Dishonor And Depravity: Maxwell The Molester's Impending Pardon

When Donald Trump pardoned the January 6 gangsters upon returning to the White House, he proved that he is capable of any depraved act to protect himself. So while everybody should be disgusted by the prospect of a presidential pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, nobody should be surprised. There is no dishonor too low for this president.

The 63-year-old Maxwell is probably the most notorious child predator in the U.S. federal prison system, globally reviled for enabling the sexual abuse of hundreds of young girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein. Sentenced to 20 years in prison for those crimes, she has until very recently languished in a Florida maximum-security prison, as required by federal law for felons like her.

Suddenly and mysteriously, however, the Bureau of Prisons moved Maxwell to a shiny new facility in Texas last week, with far less stringent security and far more comfortable quarters. It is the luxury version of detention coveted by all the incarcerated guests of the federal system.

Since registered sex offenders such as Maxwell are not supposed to be eligible for such a "Club Fed" dormitory, the events leading up to her transfer are highly suggestive of favoritism and even corruption. She was moved without any notice to the public or to her many victims following a series of long, closed meetings between Maxwell and her lawyer and Todd Blanche, the former Trump defense lawyer appointed by the president to serve as deputy attorney general of the United States Justice Department.

As everyone paying attention knows, those meetings occurred amid a national uproar over the Trump administration's continuing coverup of the "Epstein files" — meaning all the information gleaned by the FBI during its investigation of that predator. As rage mounted, even among Trump loyalists, the public has seen increasing indications that Trump himself has much to fear from his own multiple appearances in those files. He might be in even more trouble if his old friend Maxwell, a constant presence during his long and troubling relationship with Epstein, were to tell what she knows.

Yet with a pardon dangled before her eyes by a Trump defense lawyer wearing a Justice Department badge, Maxwell might easily be induced to forget whatever she knows about the president — or start to "remember" terrible things about his political enemies. When the old Trump Justice Department indicted her in 2019, prosecutors considered charging her with perjury after she lied repeatedly under oath. Now this Trump Justice Department has fired Maurene Comey, the professional prosecutor who won Maxwell's 2021 conviction, and have instead sent a hack defense counsel to bargain with her.

Julie K. Brown, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami Herald reporter who first exposed the Bush Justice Department's 2008 sweetheart deal with Epstein, says that the "survivors" who testified against Maxwell feel betrayed — and fear a renewed coverup. There is no conceivable reason to pardon her or commute her sentence, except to save Trump from embarrassment or worse.

"(Maxwell) does know a lot," Brown told Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz on their Court of History podcast last week. "She was on the ground level of this sex trafficking operation. In fact, some of the ... survivors believe that she, in a way, was a bigger monster than Epstein, because she was the one that made them feel safe. She was the one that brought them in. She used fraud (to attract girls) by saying, 'He's going to hire you, you're going to travel, you're going to be a masseuse.' ... She sort of acted like a motherly nurturing type, you know, English lady with her English accent."

Her false front allowed Epstein to get "a foot in the door" at local high schools and spas, where she scouted the "pretty girls" that she and her wealthy coconspirator would rape, abuse and intimidate. Even the consideration of a pardon for her is appalling — but wholly in character for this president, his Justice Department, and the pious hypocrites in his party.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Ghislaine Blames Victim (And More From Her Pardon-Pushing Prison Script)

Ghislaine Blames Victim (And More From Her Pardon-Pushing Prison Script)

When I was helping produce a three part series about Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, our team put in many hours discussing how and why she became the woman dozens of witnesses accused of heinous acts including underage solicitation, grooming, and trafficking. What kind of woman would serve up teen “nubiles” to a man who supposedly needed new girls on the daily? Why would she participate in an industrial scale sex trafficking operation? Was she pathologically inclined to assault? Was she groomed herself from childhood into the perfect tool for powerful men?

We hunted down and pored over clues to her psyche. We spoke with dozens of people who knew her in New York and in the U.K. where she grew up the tenth child in a wealthy family. We studied her father, media baron Robert Maxwell, a cruel, damaged oaf and one of the most mysterious figures in Cold War intrigue, associated with Israeli, and probably American, and maybe even Russian intelligence. What we didn’t do – what no one then could do - was hear from the woman herself.

Now she has spoken. In the released transcripts and audio from two days in a closed room with a Trump lawyer at a Tallahassee courthouse, she participated in a brazen feint at “transparency” for the Epstein conspiracy diehards threatening the MAGA coalition. It’s a fascinating charade and some enterprising theater director could turn the transcript verbatim into an excellent off-Broadway play.

Todd Blanche (one of the Epsteingate plumbers we covered here) threw softballs, and often answered Maxwell’s questions for her, while she suffered memory lapses, trashed victims, and demonstrably lied about her role and relationship with Epstein. (To be fair, Blanche did seem a little shocked that she couldn’t remember the reason for an $18 million payment from the sex trafficker.)

Blanche arranged the meeting after the Wall Street Journal published Trump’s “shared secrets” birthday note. That item is one of many artifacts – mostly photographic – confirming that the two men were close friends for years. The White House reportedly believed the item came from Maxwell’s side.

What else might be stashed in Pandora’s box?

While working on the documentary, we thought Maxwell would eventually trade evidence against untold numbers of powerful men ensnared in Epstein’s surveilled pleasure palace. Alan Dershowitz calls her “the key” to the case.

Anyone who reads the transcript and is familiar with the Maxwell story knows that there are many questions Blanche didn’t ask. But the transcript is filled with Easter eggs nonetheless.

Maxwell said a friend introduced her to Epstein as a potential husband in April 1991. If that’s true, is it just coincidence that it’s the same month Les Wexner mysteriously gave Epstein power of attorney over his entire fortune – a sum that enabled Epstein to catapult into the realm of blackmailable influential rich men. That same month, Epstein got his first private jet. According to flight logs, Maxwell would make 50 flights during the first year he owned it, often to Columbus, Ohio, where Wexner lived.

When Blanche asked her whether she had ever had any contact with an individual from Mossad, Maxwell replied: “Well not deliberately.”

“Pardon me?” Blanche replied, then moved on.

He was similarly blasé when she said Epstein hosted Ehud Barak, the former prime minister and head of military intelligence. Blanche breezed on to a question about Epstein’s use of testosterone instead.

Blanche worked to deliver backup for the MAGA obsession du jour, baiting his hook with the names of various Democrats – Andrew and Chris Cuomo, Bill Gates, Bobby Kennedy – trawling for evidence to build the elusive “client list” of progressive libertines. But Maxwell stood firm. “I never, ever saw any man doing something inappropriate with a woman of any age. I never saw inappropriate habits.”

Kind of depends on your definition of “inappropriate” of course: in court testimony, numerous women described Maxwell participating in the “massages” – stripping, pulling out sex toys, etc. To Blanche, she added a caveat: “Now, somebody's inappropriate and mine may be different.”

Inquiring minds might ask a follow-up to that. Blanche replied only: “Yep.”

In Maxwell’s memory, the bathrobe is the great leitmotif. “I don’t believe I ever saw him in a bathrobe,” Maxwell replied to a question about whether Dershowitz ever received a massage.

Maxwell used the exposure to settle scores and portray herself as a victim, a rebrand that, if successful, should win a Clio. She blamed her first public accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, 16 when she was recruited to service Epstein, for turning Jeff from a regular guy who just liked a daily massage or two, into an insatiable sex monster who always “wanted new,” causing Maxwell to trawl the spas of Palm Beach or the Caribbean for “masseuses” (she never called the victims women or girls). Roberts, Maxwell said, was trained “to be what every man wants in all its manners, fellatio and everything else.”

The transcript ends exactly where it likely began as the stunt was conceived in Washington – the birthday book. Blanche’s final question is the one eating his boss alive: “Do you know -- do you remember being told or knowing where the book is now?” Maxwell said she assumed the Southern District of New York feds had leaked it.

Maxwell knew exactly why she was there: She produced the money quote for Trump right away: “In the time that I was with him he was a gentleman in all respects.” The line made Fox News headlines and allowed MAGA propagandists to crow that Trump was ever honorable.

A week later Ghislaine was moved to finer prison digs, a way station perhaps to a pardon. And so the myth of the orange archangel sent from above to rescue children from pedophile elites lives another day.

AUTHOR NOTE: Readers interested in more about Ghislaine Maxwell, watch my recent Substack Live Sex Lies and Money with director Barbara Shearer and a long talk with Sidney Blumenthal at his Court of History podcast.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

'Historians For Harris' Warn Of  Fateful Parallel Between 2024 And 1860

'Historians For Harris' Warn Of  Fateful Parallel Between 2024 And 1860

On November 1, a group of more than 500 historians -- including distinguished academics, bestselling authors, and award-winning documentarians -- issued the following statement about the upcoming presidential election and its ominous resonance with the turning point that preceded the Civil War. The full list of signers is posted here.

As American historians, we are deeply alarmed by the impending election. Since 1789, the nation has prospered under a Constitution dedicated to securing the general welfare, under a national government bound by the rule of law in which no one interest or person holds absolute power. In 1860, an elite interest dedicated to human slavery attempted to shatter the Union rather than accede to the constitutional rule of law by accepting the outcome of the election, plunging the nation into Civil War.

Today, Donald Trump, openly hostile to democracy and to American constitutional customs, seeks to return to office as president. He has flagrantly defied the rule of law. He repeatedly sought to thwart the result of the free and fair election of 2020. His performance has persuaded many of those who worked most closely with him that he is an authoritarian. Now a convicted felon, he has stated his intention to use his power to intimidate, prosecute and imprison his political critics and opponents, whom he designates as “the enemy within.” Given the free hand that he would enjoy today by the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, we take his threats with utmost seriousness as a clear and present danger to American democracy.

Kamala Harris has dedicated her life to affirming the rule of law and democracy. As a prosecutor and California attorney-general, she pursued justice without fear or favor. As U.S. Senator, she confronted those who would aid and abet the malign use of authority. As Vice President, she has worked to find solutions to urgent problems, domestic and foreign. As a presidential candidate, she has called out her opponent as a disgrace to his oath as president to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

We believe, based on our study of the past, that the nation stands at an unprecedented historical as well as a political crossroads. On the outcome of this election, no less than the election of 1860, hangs the fate of both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. We appeal to our fellow citizens, whether conservative, independent, or liberal, regardless of party affiliation, to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. We make this call not as partisans but as historians who believe in the pursuit of a more perfect Union—and we urge all Americans to join us.

Kai Bird

Sidney Blumenthal

Ken Burns

Ron Chernow

Beverly Gage

Eddie Glaude

Jon Meacham

Sean Wilentz