House investigators probing Jeffrey Epstein case urged to unseal the Clinton impeachment files

Sen. Lindsey Graham, who served as a House impeachment manager during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, is urging the House Oversight Committee to review the voluminous amount of unreleased Clinton impeachment documents.

The committee’s chairman, Rep. James Comer, is already seeking depositions from Mr. Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, about their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

“I would encourage him to look [at the files],” Mr. Graham told The Washington Times, describing the secretive investigative documents from the Clinton impeachment in 1998 as “pretty bad stuff.”

“There are some things in there that didn’t get into the stream for a reason. And I accept the results of [the Clinton] impeachment. He served out his term,” he said. “If you’re talking about files, you want to look at those files.”

Mr. Graham was one of 65 House Republicans in 1998 who viewed the tens of thousands of unreleased Clinton impeachment documents, which have now been hidden from the public for 30 years.

Mr. Comer told The Times that he was interested in opening the Clinton impeachment files, currently under wraps in the congressional archives.

The Times reached out to the Clintons for comment.

Mr. Clinton is under fresh scrutiny after he appeared in several photos in a new tranche of the Justice Department’s Epstein files released Friday.

In the photos, Mr. Clinton is seen in various settings — a hot tub, a swimming pool, on Epstein’s private jet. He sometimes appears with women whose faces are blacked out.

Mr. Clinton has not been accused of wrongdoing related to Epstein.

Clinton spokesman Angel Ureña said on social media that the photos of Mr. Clinton are a distraction from what the Trump Justice Department is hiding in its Epstein files.

“This isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be,” he said.

The Clintons were scheduled to give depositions this week on Capitol Hill about their relationship with Epstein, but their appearances were postponed until January.

Mr. Comer warned in a letter to their attorney, David Kendall, that if either fails to appear for their depositions, both risk being held in contempt by Congress.

He said the Clintons’ attorney previously said his clients could not testify as originally scheduled because they were attending a funeral.

Although many believe Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s 1998 report disclosed the final findings of his investigation of Mr. Clinton, around 60,000 pages of documents and other material were seen by only a few people involved in the 106th Congress’ House Judiciary Committee’s case against the 42nd president.

Mr. Clinton was impeached in 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice related to a sexual harassment lawsuit by Paula Jones and his extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He was acquitted by the Senate in early 1999.

At the time, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde hired Chicago attorney David Schippers to be the panel’s Chief Investigative Counsel to help prosecute the committee’s case against Mr. Clinton.

Schippers, who died in 2018, detailed in a 2016 interview with American Family Radio’s Sandy Rios how the evidence against Mr. Clinton was safeguarded.

“It was a locked guarded room. The rules were that only members of the committee, not their staff, nobody else — only members of the committee had access to that room. They had to sign in and sign out. They could take nothing in with them, and they could bring nothing out,” Schippers said.

Schippers and his team were responsible for going through all of the documents about different Clinton scandals collected by Starr, who died in 2022.

“When they announced they had all the materials in the room, I put my staff together and said, ‘Alright, look, if this is nothing but Monica Lewinsky — if this is nothing but sex, we’ll be out of here in a couple of weeks. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna look at everything. We’re gonna listen to everything. We’re gonna read every word. Each one of us is going to do it.’”

He added, “There were some 60,000 documents in there plus telephone calls — all kinds of stuff.”

Schippers said many lawmakers walked in skeptical and walked out in shock.

“I would say five times a day, congressmen would come in and say, ‘Dave, we’re doing this for Henry [Hyde]. But I’m telling you right now, I’m not voting for impeachment.’ [I said] ‘that’s OK, just take a look,’” Schippers said.

“And I remember one time one of those men who said that to me, and I saw him in the room. He had his head in his hands and reading something, and he was just muttering, ‘My God. My God. How bad can it get?’ Of that 65, 64 ended up voting for impeachment once they saw what was in there.”

He added, “Not one senator, though it was open to all of them, not one senator came over and looked at that material. I think they didn’t want to look at it because they were afraid of what they were going to find.”

Schippers was legally prevented from ever revealing what he learned about Hillary Clinton from the evidence in the room, but talked about his own investigation, saying she was “all over” her husband’s scandals.

“She was the one who was orchestrating all the attacks on the people that she called ‘the bimbos,’” he said.​ “I talked to every one of those ‘bimbos,’ and they were decent, honorable, good women. All of them were in some way threatened or attacked directly.​”