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\n

Leon Black told the House Oversight Committee on Friday that he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s crimes during the years he paid the convicted sex offender tens of millions of dollars, according to a copy of the billionaire investor\u2019s prepared remarks.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t understand why people \u2014 including members of this committee \u2014 would accept baseless speculation about me without regard to the facts and spin such ugly and vicious narratives that are demonstrably false,\u201d Black said in his opening statement, obtained by Blue Light News.<\/p>\n

Lawmakers, however, filed into Black\u2019s scheduled transcribed interview Friday morning already suspicious of their witness. House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters he believed Black\u2019s testimony had \u201cthe potential to be the most groundbreaking\u201d of anything the panel has heard so far in its long-running Epstein investigation.<\/p>\n

Comer also said the committee had reason to believe that Black had signed nondisclosure agreements with some of Epstein\u2019s victims.<\/p>\n

Black, a co-founder of Apollo Global Management, did acknowledge in his prepared remarks that he was aware of Epstein\u2019s 2008 sex crime conviction at the time of their association but that \u201cEpstein told me that it was an isolated incident resulting from a fake ID.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFive years after his conviction, I gave Epstein a second chance, as did many others,\u201d he continued. \u201cI wish I had not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Black also told lawmakers that he knew Epstein for 18 years before he began paying him in 2013 for tax and estate planning. At that time, Black said, he saw Epstein surrounded by some of the world\u2019s most powerful people \u2014 among them former President Bill Clinton, tech mogul and philanthropist Bill Gates and then-White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler. <\/p>\n

And he appeared to suggest that he saw Epstein as legitimate, in part, because of those who chose to associate with him: \u201cEpstein appeared to me and to many others to have redeemed himself: [H]e served on several prestigious boards, hobnobbed with leading people in academia, the arts, business executives, and numerous world leaders.”<\/p>\n

Clinton and Gates have already spoken with Oversight investors about their ties to Epstein; Ruemmler has agreed to sit for an interview with the panel in July.<\/p>\n

Black said he ultimately fired Epstein in 2018 \u201cafter growing tired of his relentless pursuit of more and more money from me for professional services, his mistruths and misrepresentations \u2026 and his failure to repay most of a $30 million demand loan that I had made to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also acknowledged the allegations of sexual misconduct that have been levied against him in litigation, which he called \u201cdemonstrably baseless\u201d and \u201centirely fabricated.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one recent case, the judge found that the law firm that had been representing Black\u2019s accusers and the plaintiff in the case were \u201cengaged in serious, sanctionable misconduct in this case.\u201d However, the lawsuit \u2014 brought by a woman who claimed to have been raped by Black when she was 16 \u2014 was allowed to proceed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are numerous allegations of real abuse by women \u2014 by survivors \u2014 against Mr. Black,\u201d Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, told reporters Friday morning.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leon Black told the House Oversight Committee on Friday that he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s crimes during the years he paid the convicted sex offender tens of millions of dollars, according to a copy of the billionaire investor\u2019s prepared remarks. \u201cI don\u2019t understand why people \u2014 including members of this committee \u2014 would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}