Ghislaine Maxwell’s virtual appearance Monday before the House Oversight Committee was never going to produce meaningful testimony. Everyone involved understood that in advance. Her lawyers said so explicitly, the committee knew it, the press understood it and any lawyer with experience in criminal practice knew it.
Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence for her role in aiding the late Jeffrey Epstein in the sexual abuse of underage girls, was always going to invoke the Fifth Amendment: fully and repeatedly and without deviation.
Lawmakers didn’t call her before Congress to extract information but to stage an event.
And yet, after Monday’s charade, Committee Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., told reporters, “Ghislaine Maxwell took the fifth and refused to answer any questions. This is obviously very disappointing.”
It was clear both before she began invoking the Fifth Amendment and after she finished that lawmakers didn’t call her before Congress to extract information but to stage an event. That distinction matters because Congress is not a second prosecutor. Its constitutional role in moments like this is oversight, not reenactment.
Oversight is not supposed to be loud or theatrical, and it is not designed to hinge on the implausible hope that a witness facing ongoing postconviction litigation will suddenly decide to self-incriminate in a public forum. Oversight is meant to be methodical, document-driven and focused on institutional decision-making, particularly when the justice system has plainly failed to deliver broad accountability.
If Congress wants to understand how the Epstein investigation unfolded, then its members should know that the answer was never going to come from a brief deposition punctuated by Fifth Amendment invocations. The answers can only come from documents.
The real oversight work is occurring quietly and unglamorously, away from the cameras, as lawmakers review unredacted prosecution memoranda, internal DOJ and FBI communications and investigative files that explain why certain cases stalled, narrowed or ended altogether.
That is where accountability resides.
Redactions matter not merely because they conceal names, but more significantly because they obscure reasoning. When charging decisions, declinations and investigative strategy are blacked out, Congress is unable to assess whether prosecutors followed the evidence wherever it led, or whether institutional caution, resource constraints, policy choices or external pressures factored into how prosecutors responded.
Those are precisely the kinds of questions Congressional oversight exists to answer.
Yet the Maxwell deposition suggests that Congress has blurred the line between oversight and spectacle. Calling a witness who is legally compelled to remain silent may generate headlines, but it produces little meaningful information and risks substituting performative outrage for substantive inquiry.
That trade-off should concern anyone who cares about institutional accountability.
If the Justice Department were focused on substantive oversight, it could have sent an attorney steeped in the facts of the case to interview Maxwell last year, rather than Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general — an atypical and unusual choice for a fact-driven witness interview — who previously served as the president’s personal attorney.
The Epstein-Maxwell case has already generated enormous political noise over the years, much of it untethered from evidence and amplified by partisan conflict. When oversight becomes another stage for symbolic fights or recycled grievances, it obscures the very institutional failures it is meant to illuminate.
Why were certain investigative leads pursued aggressively while others were not?
None of this is meant to suggest that Congress should avoid asking hard questions. It should not. But the hardest questions are not posed to a witness invoking the Fifth Amendment; they are posed to institutions that had years, resources and evidence at their disposal, yet produced remarkably limited results.
Why were certain investigative leads pursued aggressively while others were not? Why did theories of conspiracy liability narrow rather than expand over time? Why did some individuals face criminal exposure while others did not, and what standards governed those decisions?
Those answers cannot be obtained by asking questions of a witness everyone knows will invoke her constitutional right not to answer. Those answers can only come out of an examination of unredacted documents that reflect prosecutorial judgment and institutional choice.
The same is true of the civil settlements and nondisclosure agreements involving Epstein. The existence of a settlement does not establish criminal conduct, but Congress has a legitimate oversight interest in understanding whether civil resolutions displaced criminal scrutiny or contributed, explicitly or implicitly, to prosecutorial restraint.
Similarly, references to foreign contacts or national-security considerations warrant careful review regardless of whether they result in charges. Oversight is not limited to criminal liability alone; it also encompasses understanding whether broader governmental interests influenced investigative outcomes.
None of this work is particularly telegenic, and none of it produces viral clips. But this is precisely the kind of work Congress exists to do.
Spectacle is easy. Oversight is harder.
Oversight is not meant to reenact prosecutions that failed. It is meant to explain why they failed and whether the system has learned anything as a result.
If Congress wants accountability, then it should move away from staging moments and focus instead on interrogating decisions. If it wants answers, it should concentrate less on who is speaking and more on what has been withheld.
Spectacle is easy. Oversight is harder. And only one of them meaningfully serves the public interest.
