Hillary Clinton’s testimony before members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will focus on the federal government’s handling of the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as potential ethics violations by elected officials, according to a person granted anonymity to share details of the plans for the closed-door deposition in Chappaqua, New York.

The former secretary of State will testify today, and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, will be deposed Friday.

Among the terms for Hillary Clinton’s agreement to comply with a congressional subpoena and participate in the panel’s Epstein investigation, she will agree to engage in questions about Epstein and Maxwell’s efforts to exploit their connections to powerful figures — such as the Clintons — to protect themselves from accountability for their alleged sex trafficking crimes, the person said.

The Oversight panel has also agreed to discuss the government’s mishandling of the Epstein case, which began in Florida long after Bill Clinton left office.

Notably, the list of agreed-upon issues does not include unrelated topics that have long been a fixation among Republicans, such as Hillary Clinton’s handling of the 2012 Benghazi attack while she was secretary of State or her use of a private email server for official communications. She was dogged by both issues as she ran for president in 2016 against Donald Trump.

Neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton has been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. Hillary Clinton has maintained she has no memory of meeting Epstein, while Bill Clinton has admitted to using Epstein’s plane on several occasions but has maintained he never visited his island.

Both have said they had no knowledge of his crimes.

House members are eyeing a new phase in their monthslong investigation into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein: a race to produce results that match the stunning Epstein fallout across the globe and satisfy an electorate clamoring for accountability.

This week’s interviews of Bill and Hillary Clinton — who are scheduled to testify to lawmakers under subpoena and behind closed doors about their relationships with Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell — could be a pivotal moment in this effort.

Bill Clinton has maintained that he was an acquaintance of Epstein’s but stopped communicating with him at least a decade before his arrest in 2019, and he has not been accused of wrongdoing.

His spokesperson Angel Ureña posted on social media in 2019 that the former president traveled on Epstein’s plane four times internationally in 2002 and 2003, but that Secret Service details were present “on every leg of the trip.” Hillary Clinton has said she has no memory of meeting Epstein at all.

But the Clintons’ depositions before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee come as the recent arrests in Britain of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, and ex-ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson, have only intensified the pressure on Congress to produce similarly dramatic impacts closer to home.

That means both Clintons will be put under a microscope for any potential transgression, whether it relates to the late financier’s sex trafficking conviction or not.

“Obviously, the committee wants to see some people be held accountable,” said Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) in an interview in advance of the high-profile depositions. The former president will testify Friday, and the former secretary of state Thursday, both in Chappaqua, N.Y.

Roughly 19 members are expected to be on hand for the depositions, and Comer said he suspected questions to focus on what interactions the couple had with Epstein — in the White House or elsewhere.

“I think what you’re seeing in Britain is, the charges against Prince Andrew and the former ambassador weren’t sex-related crimes. They were more with respect to treason and selling secrets and things like that,” he explained. “We were just fascinated how Epstein was able to surround himself with so many high-profile government figures, not just in the United States, but in other countries, so I think there will be a lot of questions.”

Linking Bill or Hillary Clinton to any type of criminal charge would be a win for Republicans, who are facing growing pressure to take down any powerful person with ties to Epstein — even as President Donald Trump’s own connections to the late financier present persistent questions and ongoing political liability. That’s especially true as the Justice Department faces criticism for its haphazard release of the Epstein files, including allegations from Democrats that the administration is covering up for the commander-in-chief.

“The DOJ hasn’t released all the files … terabytes of data, millions of files,” said GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, a member of the Oversight panel. “We need to bring in witnesses, people that will actually give us information and tell us the truth. Because so far, you know, people aren’t being honest.”

Countless public figures and elected officials have communicated with Epstein over the years, and many of those communications are not criminal in nature — even if there has been a reckoning for some of those individuals. Larry Summers, for instance,announced Wednesday he would resign from Harvard University, an institution he once led, as a result of his association with Epstein highlighted in the files.

That means that delivering accountability is not so simple, and lawmakers are fighting an uphill battle to put anyone behind bars in connection with Epstein. Obstacles include a key witness who won’t cooperate — Epstein’s imprisoned co-conspirator Maxwell, who has invoked the Fifth Amendment — and the fact that records might show investigative targets mingling with Epstein but not engaging in specific illegal acts.

“Most of our big investigations have ended with criminal referrals,” Comer said. “This is a complicated investigation. A lot of the major players have died.”

Meanwhile, even Democrats, who have cast themselves as the champions of transparency in the Epstein saga, now appear willing to go hard in their questioning of Bill Clinton after the caucus was initially divided over whether the former first couple should be held in contempt for failing to appear for previously-scheduled depositions.

“Our job is to, regardless of how powerful the person with knowledge of this abuse and trafficking ring is, to find out what they know, who else is implicated, what they’ve seen, what they participated in,” said Rep. Emily Randall (D-Wash.), a member of the Oversight Committee. “We definitely are there to ask questions that will help us uncover more information. Not to throw softballs.”

At the same time, Democrats are cognizant that the GOP sees an easy target in Bill Clinton, who is featured in multiple images released by the DOJ. None of those photos indicate illicit or illegal activities, but Republicans and the White House have used them anyway to elevate the former president as an alternative bogeyman to Trump, who remains Democrats’ main target.

Trump has also not been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein and has maintained his innocence.

“I don’t think anybody should be spared,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, in an interview earlier this week. “But [Republicans are] going to have a hard time just pinning it on Bill Clinton, I think, because there’s just too many others. … The minute they go to Bill Clinton, they gotta go to Trump as well, because there’s really significant stuff about Trump in there.”

The House Oversight investigation dates back to July, when Democrats and a handful of Republicans in a subcommittee hearing voted to subpoena the Justice Department for all of the materials in its Epstein investigation.

That vote launched a formal probe that led to other subpoenas for individuals in Epstein’s orbit, along with the release of documents and images from the Epstein estate, including the now-infamous “birthday book” where Trump allegedly wrote Epstein a message accompanied by a lewd drawing.

Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) forced a House vote in November to compel DOJ to release its complete Epstein archive, and the department has since presided over a staggered document dump that has been criticized by members of both parties as misleading and incomplete.

But while several high-profile individuals have suffered reputational blows from their associations with Epstein laid bare in newly-public documents, no arrests have been made in the U.S. as a direct result.

Lawmakers remain eager to show that their work has still been effective, and that hunger has led to some missteps. For one, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) publicly accused EPA administrator Lee Zeldin of taking campaign money from a Jeffrey Epstein — but the former Republican congressman actually received the money from a physician with the same name.

And Khanna read aloud a number of names on the House floor that of men who were initially redacted from the DOJ files — some of which reportedly had no apparent connection to Epstein.

In an interview this week, Khanna said Congress’ work must culminate in prosecutions for those involved in Epstein’s scheme.

“We need to look at what Britain’s doing, what France is doing, what Norway is doing, and have those kind of prosecutions here,” he said.

“I just want to see prosecutions,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) also said in an interview.

After the Clintons are deposed Thursday and Friday, the committee has scheduled testimony from two co-executors of Epstein’s estate. Earlier this month, the panel heard from billionaire businessman Les Wexner, a onetime client of Epstein whose fortune helped fuel Epstein’s wealth. The former CEO of Victoria’s Secret insisted he severed ties with Epstein around the time that authorities were investigating sex crimes allegations against the late financier and accused Epstein of stealing from and lying to him.

While some members of the panel are clamoring to subpoena more witnesses, Comer suggested his committee’s strategy could now shift as the midterms approach and the 119th Congress comes to a close. The panel, he said, could soon turn to new questions — including some that have been the subject of conspiracy theories.

“Was Jeffrey Epstein a spy? Was he an agent?” Comer said. “Was he trading secrets with the U.S. government, the Israeli government — you know, the Middle Eastern government?”

“I’m trying to make sure the committee understands we’ve got to really focus on a timeline here,” Comer said. “It took six months to get the Clintons in.”

President Donald Trump sketched out his vision Tuesday night of Republican governance heading into the midterms. Congress is barely in the picture.

From a legislative perspective, Trump’s State of the Union address was notable for what it didn’t include. He gave Republicans a pass on trying to revive his global tariff campaign after a major Supreme Court setback. He didn’t demand another party-line domestic policy bill before November, and he even skipped a jab at one of his favorite punching bags, the Senate filibuster.

Instead, Trump used the bulk of the speech to lean into red-meat issues like illegal immigration and gender-affirming health care, while encouraging lawmakers to tackle a few relatively minor topics — many of which have already been churning behind the scenes for months.

“He wasn’t really pushing us to do anything we don’t [already] want to do,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said.

The upshot is that Trump’s prime-time address is unlikely to make more than a ripple in the congressional agenda over the coming months. It’s the reality, Republicans acknowledged Wednesday, of life in Washington right now: Despite its trifecta, the party’s legislative ambitions are being hemmed in by its barely-there majorities.

“I think we know what the agenda items are,” Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pa.) said. “Accomplishing those is going to be hard with a small majority.”

GOP leaders on Capitol Hill are vowing to focus on pocketbook issues heading into the midterms, as they try to convince skeptical voters the party is responding to lingering economic angst.

The Senate, for example, is expected to tee up a bipartisan housing bill at the end of this week, and Majority Leader John Thune hinted Wednesday that other measures, such as an energy permitting overhaul, could be on the chamber’s to-do list for the rest of this Congress.

But Trump showed only passing concern about lawmakers’ anxieties Tuesday, sending the message that the economy was on the rebound — asserting that prices were falling just fine and that last year’s GOP megabill did quite enough to address any voter concerns.

He mentioned “affordability” only to engage in a blame game — accusing Democrats of embracing that word “knowing full well that they caused and created the increased prices that all of our citizens had to endure.”

Instead, Trump pressed lawmakers to “codify” a drug pricing plan his administration negotiated with some pharmaceutical manufacturers and rolled out a retirement savings program that largely builds on a bipartisan law signed by his predecessor, Joe Biden. He also weighed in on the housing proposal, urging members to limit home purchases by institutional investors.

Those matters have already been percolating on Capitol Hill, with internal divisions among Republicans creating major obstacles in some cases.

“On our side, obviously, they’re not unanimous,” Thune said about the housing and drug proposals. “There are a lot of these things that are not just that clear cut.”

The situation in the House is even more tenuous. While the thin GOP majority there was able to eke through a partisan elections bill Trump highlighted Tuesday, they have had a harder time building support for another bill that earned a presidential endorsement: a ban on lawmaker stock-trading.

Speaker Mike Johnson, while not ruling anything out, acknowledged his “small margin” will affect what items on Trump’s wishlist, if any, ultimately make it to the president’s desk. Republicans can currently lose just one vote on party-line matters, and one GOP lawmaker, Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas, is facing pressure to resign amid allegations of an affair with a subordinate who died by suicide.

“I’ve got effectively a zero-vote margin at the point that we are now, so I’ve got to have near-unanimity among Republican priorities,” Johnson said. “I would like to say we could do some bipartisan things, but it’ll be up to the Democrats.”

Rep. Mike Haridopolos (R-Fla.) characterized the House GOP as a “micromajority” Wednesday and questioned whether one of its members — Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who frequently breaks with Trump — even still qualified as a Republican: “I don’t know what party he belongs to, but it’s not ours.”

Trump did use his bully pulpit Tuesday to urge Senate Republicans to act on the House-passed elections bill, the SAVE America Act, that would place new restrictions on the ability to vote. That included an apparent appeal to Thune, who was in the House chamber for the speech.

But Trump didn’t push to skirt the 60-vote legislative hurdle by forcing Democrats to hold the floor in a so-called “talking filibuster” to oppose the bill — as some conservatives personally lobbied Thune on the House floor Tuesday to do, the Senate leader acknowledged.

Thune said he has tentative plans to bring the bill to the floor sometime next month, so long as the Department of Homeland Security shutdown is resolved. But the lack of a sustained presidential push to upend existing filibuster rules makes it even more likely the legislation is likely to sputter out.

Thune, who has repeatedly warned about the potential pitfalls of the talking filibuster approach, said Wednesday it was “a very real possibility” the bill could be brought up under the usual approach that would allow Democrats to quickly block it.

The reality of Congress’ legislative morass isn’t stopping some Trump allies, who are either running for reelection or for another office, from trying to use his State of the Union speech as a springboard to action.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has linked himself closely to Trump, said Wednesday that Republicans “need to legislate with the same spirit as President Trump’s speech.” And GOP Rep. Andy Biggs, who is running for governor of Arizona, touted his own legislation that he said aligns with Trump’s priorities.

“I urge House Leadership to quickly move my bills that align with his priorities,” he said in a statement. “The time to act is now.”

Some conservatives continue to urge Congress to pass another party-line policy bill under filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation rules to give the party a messaging boost before the midterms.

But others who listened to Trump’s speech Tuesday weren’t nearly so inspired. One House Republican granted anonymity to speak candidly quipped, “It was certainly light on details.”

A GOP senator, also granted anonymity, summed up the congressional agenda for the foreseeable future in one word: “Slow.”