If and when Democrats do indeed win back control of the House of Representatives in the November midterm elections, First Lady Melania Trump had better start looking for a good attorney because she’s likely to be subpoenaed by the very same House Oversight Committee that demanded testimony this week from former President Bill Clinton and his wife, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Why? Well, partially as retribution for what is being done to the Clintons, but also because Melania has absolutely no legal shield, according to a legal expert.
CNN’s Elie Honig explained on the network that Melania could be placed in a very uncomfortable position and wind up revealing information that would be incredibly damaging to the so-called current president.
“Precedent in Congress is only as strong as whoever holds the majority,” Honig noted, “but we’ve heard Democratic members of this Oversight Committee say if [they] take over in November, which certainly could happen, [they] then plan to subpoena Donald Trump. Now, the response from the Republican side has been, well but the sitting president is different than a former president, and there’s something to that. There are many legal settings where the courts give the sitting president more privileges, more exemptions, more immunities than a former president. So we’ll see if the Democrats take over. But it certainly gives them a political mechanism to say, well, hey you subpoenaed the Democratic former president, we want to subpoena the Republican former president.”
“But Melania is an interesting one, too, right, because the justification, part of the justification for Hillary Clinton is neither of them are president but, well, she knows something about her husband’s activities,” Honig added. “That same rationale would certainly apply in reverse to Melania. So, again, if the Dems take over, that could be a subpoena they’re considering.”
As for President Clinton, Honig said he expects some difficult questions from Republicans on the committee, but the man is more than equal to the challenge.
“Bill Clinton is a notoriously difficult subject to be questioned,” Honig said. “The man is a lawyer, he was president. He’s been questioned by prosecutors and lawyers and the media countless times when they prepared for the 1998 grand jury testimony in front of Ken Starr sounds like similar to what the reporting is about, how they’ve prepared for this testimony they’ve spent hours upon hours, days upon days getting ready for this like it was a boxing match or a chess match, and the thing they did in ’98 – and I would watch for this today – is they had Bill Clinton prepared with about a dozen what they called set pieces, meaning pre-rehearsed speeches or talking points that he would use, and there’s a couple reasons for that.”
“One, they want to keep him on message, and two, they want to run out the clock,” he added. “Bill Clinton is really good at taking over these settings and filibustering and running down the time allotted.”
Of course, if Melania does wind up having to give testimony after the November elections, the committee will face a much larger challenge: Trying to understand what the hell she’s saying in her pidgin English.
