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In the long-running power struggle between the legislative and executive branches, a House Republican’s success this week at forcing a former president to agree to be deposed in a congressional investigation counted as a triumph for Congress.
The victory of Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the Oversight Committee, in a monthslong battle with Bill and Hillary Clinton over testifying on Capitol Hill in his panel’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation marked a singular moment.
No former president has ever been compelled to testify to Congress under subpoena.
Members of Congress don’t necessarily think that is a good thing; they want the ability to bring in former presidents when they are relevant witnesses and may have something meaningful to say. And Mr. Comer’s move was a rare power play by a Republican lawmaker at a time when the G.O.P.-led House and Senate have ceded much of their power to the White House.
But his accomplishment also amounted to a remarkable use of government power to target a political adversary — the kind seen more often in autocratic societies where a peaceful transfer of power is not a given because leaders fear ending up in prison after leaving office. And it was one that some experts said further chipped away at the country’s democratic norms.
“It’s something we would do in a banana republic,” said the historian Douglas Brinkley. “The depositions will be controlled by Comer. The lighting could be odd, or sketchy, to make the Clintons look like criminals. It will generate conspiracy stories and they will try to show that the Democrats are the party of corruption, not the Republicans.”
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview that, “like all powers of Congress or any other branch, these are powers that can be abused. We’re living in a period of spectacular abuse of power.”
Yet Democrats saw a silver lining in Mr. Comer’s move, which they said had given them new leeway to target President Trump and his family members down the line once the Democrats regain power in Congress and Mr. Trump is no longer in office.
“There’s no question that Oversight Democrats will want to speak to Donald Trump and others,” Representative Robert Garcia of California, the ranking member of the Oversight Committee, said in an interview. “That is a precedent that has now been set by Comer and House Republicans. If you watch President Trump’s remarks, it’s pretty clear he understands that.”
On Tuesday night in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump did not crow about the Clintons’ predicament, nor did he acknowledge that when it comes to Mrs. Clinton, he for years encouraged his crowds to call to “lock her up.” Instead, he expressed concern.
“I think it’s a shame, to be honest,” Mr. Trump told reporters of the Clintons’ being forced to testify. “I always liked him. Her? Yeah, she’s a very capable woman.”
He added, “I hate to see it, in many ways. I hate to see it, but then look at me — they went after me.”
Mr. Trump has been fairly transparent for months about what he thinks about the Epstein saga. And the spectacle of the Clintons appearing on Capitol Hill in an ongoing inquiry into Mr. Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019, only keeps alive a story that the president has long made clear he wants to move on from.
But for years, he has directed Republicans to target his political enemies, and to only investigate Democrats. In dangling the threat of criminal charges against the Clintons to secure their cooperation, Mr. Comer has followed through. His main investigations have targeted two of the last three Democratic presidents, and three of the last Democratic presidential nominees.
It was Mr. Comer who summoned Hunter Biden to testify in a House impeachment inquiry against his father, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But pushing his case against the Clintons to the point where they capitulated to all of his demands put Mr. Comer in uncharted territory. And it’s not clear that it is where he or Mr. Trump necessarily planned to end up.
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Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, at the Capitol on Tuesday, had been trying for months to get Bill and Hillary Clinton to testify in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
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