Inside Bill Barr's Testimony Over Epstein Death

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the panel’s chair who was present for the first hours of the deposition, told reporters that Barr testified that he did not know of any information that would implicate Trump.

“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.”

Asked about reporting from The Wall Street Journal that Attorney General Pam Bondi had told Trump that he was mentioned in the Epstein files, Comer said Barr talked about how “you go over everyone that you’ve ever been in communication with, or whatever, that doesn’t implicate you, as far as being guilty.”

Democrats on the panel who sat in on the deposition, meanwhile, asserted that they were taking the investigation more seriously than the Republicans.

“I think the Democratic side is doing most of the heavy lifting. I don’t think we’re learning much from the questioning from the House Republicans. It doesn’t seem like this is something where they are truly caring about the victims and about trying to get to the bottom of what’s happening,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) said.

“It seems like they are going through the motions, and they want people to believe that they are digging in,” Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) added about her Republican counterparts. “But at the end of the day, I don’t think that we’ve learned anything through the Republican questioning that you couldn’t find in one of the articles that most likely your outlets have printed.”

Comer in response said: “It’s unfortunate the Democrats are trying to, seems to me, politicize this, when you look at the basis of this, horrific crimes against young girls. And of course, the Democrats’ goal is to try to dig up some type of dirt on President Trump.”

Crockett said the questioning led her to want to seek more information from investigators in the Southern District of New York and from former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who was the prosecutor who handled Epstein’s much-criticized plea deal in 2008 and was not one of the former officials subpoenaed pursuant to the Republican-led motion in July.

Comer indicated he was open to calling more witnesses when asked about the possibility of bringing in Acosta.

“We’ll bring in everyone that we think can add information to the investigation. This is a serious investigation; this is a sincere investigation. I hope this will be a bipartisan investigation,” Comer said.