The House oversight committee voted 41 to 0 on Tuesday to recommend that the full House hold billionaire Leon Black in contempt of Congress. Every Republican and every Democrat on the committee agreed that the man who once ran Apollo Global Management has thumbed his nose at two lawful subpoenas. Black’s response, through his lawyers, was to call the vote a “complete abomination” and the subpoenas “illegitimate, illegal and a textbook abuse of power.”
Let’s be precise about what this man is refusing to do. Congress asked him two things: sit for a deposition, and hand over the nondisclosure agreements he signed. He has produced exactly one NDA, per the committee’s own release, after his own counsel indicated there were many more. He skipped his September 3 deposition after the committee had already granted him one delay. Then he sued the chairman.
The money nobody can explain
Here is the part that should keep this from being filed away as a legal spat. Black paid Jeffrey Epstein a fortune, and nobody, including Black, has ever documented what it bought.
The committee’s own accounting puts the payments at at least $158 million after Epstein was already a registered sex offender. Senator Ron Wyden, who has investigated the money from his perch on the Senate Finance Committee, documented $169.8 million between 2012 and 2017: $5.5 million in 2012 under an unsigned business agreement, $50 million in 2013 under another, $70 million in 2014, $30 million in 2015, and smaller amounts after. From 2014 onward, the Wyden letter shows, the payments were ad hoc with no contract or business agreement at all. An investigation that Apollo’s own board commissioned, conducted by the law firm Dechert across more than 60,000 documents, reached the same structural finding: Black paid Epstein “on an ad hoc basis, without negotiating written service agreements,” and the sums “far exceeded any amounts Black paid to his other professional advisors.”
The comparison Wyden drew is the one that should stop any honest reader cold. In the same two years Black paid the white shoe law firm Paul Weiss a little under $2 million for actual estate planning work, he paid Epstein roughly $120 million for purportedly similar services. Sixty times more, to a man who was not a lawyer, had been convicted of procuring a minor for prostitution in 2008, and had no documents to show for any of it. Wyden’s investigators asked Black’s attorneys for invoices, contracts, or business agreements. His attorneys produced nothing. Wyden’s conclusion was blunt: “I believe that these records do not exist.”
Black has an answer for all of this, and it deserves to be stated fairly. He says he fired Epstein in 2018 after growing tired of his relentless demands for money, that the payments were for legitimate tax and estate planning, and that “I did not know about this nefarious activity until Epstein was charged with trafficking in July 2019.” The Dechert review commissioned by Apollo’s board found no evidence that Black was involved in Epstein’s criminal activities, and Black has never been charged with a crime. Three women have sued him alleging sexual abuse; he calls those suits “demonstrably baseless,” one was dismissed, one was withdrawn, and one is still pending. I am not here to convict him of anything the record does not convict him of.
In the same prepared remarks where he claimed ignorance of anything nefarious, Black acknowledged that he knew Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 “to state charges relating to prostitution involving a minor.” He knew. He knew the man had procured a child. And then he kept writing checks, year after year, without contracts, in amounts no tax advisor on earth commands, until the total passed the GDP of some island nations.
The defense that protects everyone but the women
Black’s lawyers argue the subpoenas exceed the committee’s authority and would “expose women who value their privacy,” women who “bargained for confidentiality and have refused to release it.”
Read that sentence again and notice who is saying it. The privacy of the women is being invoked by the man who paid for the silence. If Black genuinely cared about protecting those women, the legal system offers obvious paths: in camera review by a judge, a privilege log, narrow protective orders. His lawyers offered none of them. They offered a lawsuit against a congressman and a skipped deposition.
And the survivors themselves have rejected this defense on his behalf. In September, more than a dozen women who survived Epstein’s abuse published a letter urging Black to comply, writing that “Black’s use of NDAs underscores why Congress must scrutinize the agreements in his possession” and that Congress should use “every tool available to enforce its subpoenas.” One of them, Sharlene Rochard, put it better than anyone at the Dallas Epstein files exhibit: “justice that stops when it reaches power is not justice.”
And the legislative purpose question is not genuinely open. Comer said the committee’s job is to ensure that nondisclosure agreements “cannot be used to cover up criminal activities.” Congress writing rules about confidentiality agreements that shield crimes is about as textbook a legislative purpose as exists.
We already know how this law treats people without nine figures
Here is where the record stops being abstract. Peter Navarro, a former White House trade advisor, defied a congressional subpoena, was convicted of contempt of Congress in 2023, and in 2024 he was sentenced to four months in prison and a $9,500 fine. He reported to a federal penitentiary in Miami and served the time, becoming the first former White House official imprisoned on that charge. Steve Bannon was convicted of the same offense. The statute, 2 U.S.C. 192, makes each count a misdemeanor carrying up to a year behind bars.
A trade advisor who ignored a subpoena about election machinations went to prison. A billionaire who paid a convicted sex offender nine figures for services nobody can document, and who is now stonewalling the inquiry into exactly that, has so far accumulated one committee vote. The next step requires the full House to act, and Speaker Mike Johnson’s office would not say whether he will even schedule it. If the vote dies there, Black’s strategy of delay, litigation, and attrition wins, and every billionaire watching learns the same lesson: a congressional subpoena is a suggestion if you can afford the lawyers.
Outgoing Representative Thomas Massie says the government is still withholding more than three million Epstein files nearly a year after Trump signed the Epstein Transparency Act. The contempt vote is a small, procedural moment in that much larger failure, and it is the easiest one to get right. The House should hold the floor vote, and if Black keeps defying, the Justice Department should treat him exactly as it treated Peter Navarro. Not because he has been proven guilty of anything Epstein did, but because the question on the table is narrower and already answered by his own conduct: nobody, regardless of wealth, gets to decide which lawful subpoenas apply to them.
Comer was right about one thing, whichever party you trust less. No one is above the law. The Navarro precedent exists. Now we find out whether it applies to men with ten figures, or only to men with White House badges.