House Oversight Committee subpoenas AG Bondi in Epstein investigation - Spectrum News

The House Oversight Committee voted Wednesday to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to appear as part of the committe's probe into the late, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Members of the Republican-led committee voted 24-19 in favor of the motion by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., to call in the country's top prosecutor over her department's handling of the release in the Justice Department's investigations into Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, according to Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M.

"AG Bondi claims the DOJ has released all of the Epstein files. The record is clear: they have not," Mace wrote on X on Wednesday afternoon.

A request to the Justice Department by Spectrum News was not immediately returned.

The announcement came a day after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick agreed to face questions from the House Oversight Committee over his ties to Epstein, the committee said on social media.

“We commend him for his willingness to appear and provide transparency to the American people,” the committee wrote on X on Tuesday afternoon.

Lutnick has not been accused of wrongdoing in connection to Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking crimes.

The commerce secretary and Epstein were previously neighbors in New York City, and Lutnick had said that he cut ties with the disgraced financier in 2005 — three years before Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.

Lutnick described during an interview in 2025 how he and his wife visited Epstein’s townhouse and Lutnick questioned Epstein about how often he received a massage, to which Epstein replied, “every day and the right kind of massage.”

“In the six or eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room again with that disgusting person,” Lutnick said during the podcast interview.

But records released by the Justice Department under the Epstein Files Transparency Act showed that the pair had continued correspondence, and Lutnick told members of Congress during an appearance at the Senate Appropriations Committee that he and his family, as well as another couple, had lunch with Epstein on the financier’s private island in 2012.

“We left with all of my children and with my nannies and my wife, all together,” Lutnick said last month. “We were on a family vacation. We were not apart.”

Following that testimony, multiple Democratic lawmakers, as well as Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, called for the Commerce Department chief to step down from his Cabinet role.

A date has not yet been set for Lutnick’s testimony, which was first reported by Axios, and the proceeding is expected to be behind closed doors with a recording and transcript released afterward — similar to other depositions that the committee has held.

Last week, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton each testified to the committee in Chappaqua, New York — the hamlet north of New York City where they live.

Speaking to reporters outside of the Clintons’ depositions, Democrats said the commerce secretary should sit for the committee as well, with Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., saying Friday that he thought there were enough votes on the committee to compel him to appear.

During Hillary Clinton’s interview, California Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, asked the former secretary if she thought Lutnick should have to testify in the House Oversight Committee's probe.

“I think everyone that the committee sees playing a prominent role in the files should be deposed,” she responded. “That is your job. Your job is to try to get to the truth as best you can determine it.”

At the time of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Hillary Clinton was representing New York in the U.S. Senate and Lutnick was chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street firm with its office in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. All of the firm’s 658 employees who were in the office died in the attack, including Lutnick’s younger brother. Lutnick was out of the office that morning because he was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten.

Hillary Clinton described her connection to the now-commerce secretary in a heated exchange with Mace, who pressed her about a 2015 email from Lutnick appearing to invite Epstein to a fundraising event for Hillary Clinton at the Cantor Fitzgerald offices.

“I was a senator representing the people who were murdered on 9/11,” she said. “Nobody lost more people than Howard Lutnick. You can say whatever you want, you can call and have him here before the committee, but when I knew him, I knew him as the man who lost the employees that he knew intimately, including his brother.”

Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., announced Tuesday that he sent letters to seven other people seeking interviews about their connections to Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York City jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Among those whom the committee asked for testimony were Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former CEO of Apollo Global Management Leon Black, Epstein’s former personal assistants Leslie Groff and Sarah Kellen, and Kathy Ruemmler, the top lawyer at Goldman Sachs and former White House counsel to President Barack Obama.