Rep. Jasmine Crockett walked out of Ghislaine Maxwell's closed-door deposition before the House Oversight Committee on Monday morning and delivered a message aimed squarely at President Donald Trump:
"We're gonna be on his a--."
The Texas Democrat told reporters she wants Trump called to testify in the committee's Epstein investigation — and framed her demand as a matter of moral urgency. Maxwell, the convicted Epstein accomplice, had just finished her deposition. She invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer any questions from lawmakers.
So the star witness gave them nothing. And Crockett's response was to go after the president.
According to Fox News, Crockett's remarks to reporters leaned hard on a familiar Democratic playbook: invoke children, invoke criminal convictions, and hope nobody notices the logical gaps. She told reporters:
"We have a 34-count convicted felon, and there are people that are still shielding him from any type of accountability as it relates to a child sex-trafficking ring."
That's a remarkable sentence. It conflates Trump's name appearing in released Epstein files with active involvement in sex trafficking — without a shred of evidence connecting the two. Neither Trump nor former President Bill Clinton is implicated in any wrongdoing related to Epstein. That's the actual state of the record. But "mentioned in the files" sounds damning if you strip away the context, which is precisely the point.
Crockett also aimed the committee's process, telling Fox News Digital:
"What they want to do is they want to go behind closed doors and then come out with whatever spin that they want to put on it and have it be a he said, she said."
And then:
"They are playing games right now. And again, this is all about shielding and distracting from the president of the United States, who is absolutely mentioned in those files."
"Mentioned" is doing a staggering amount of work in that sentence. Thousands of names appear in documents spanning decades of Epstein's social orbit. Being mentioned is not being implicated. Crockett knows this. She's counting on voters who don't.
Here's where it gets interesting. Crockett invoked the Clintons — not to protect them, but to use them as a prop for her argument against Trump. She told reporters:
"Right now we know that they were willing to try to throw the Clintons in prison for not showing up yet."
She then recounted her pitch during hearings:
"Then we went through the hearing as it relates to the Clintons, I said, 'Listen, we know that Donald Trump's name is mentioned more. Bring him in, too.'… This, for the Democrats, this isn't partisanship. This is about right versus wrong."
The timeline here matters. Chairman James Comer launched contempt proceedings against Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton for initially refusing to appear in person for closed-door depositions. The full House was set to vote on referring the Clintons to the DOJ for criminal charges. Their attorneys agreed to appear under Comer's terms just days before that vote, which is what compliance under pressure looks like, not what political persecution looks like.
The Clintons are now slated for closed-door, videotaped depositions, though they're demanding televised hearings instead. That's a familiar move: turn an investigation into a broadcast opportunity where sympathetic cameras do half the work.
Crockett's argument boils down to: if the Clintons face scrutiny, Trump must too. But the committee's process has applied to everyone. Maxwell sat for her deposition. The Clintons are scheduled. The process is working. What Crockett wants isn't equal treatment — it's a spectacle aimed at a sitting president, justified by the word "mentioned."
Crockett is currently mounting a bid for the Texas Senate seat held by Republican Sen. John Cornyn. That context doesn't invalidate her statements, but it illuminates them. A progressive Democrat from Texas running a long-shot statewide campaign needs national attention. Vulgar soundbites directed at the president generate exactly that.
Notice the pattern: Maxwell invokes the Fifth and provides nothing useful, and within hours, the Democratic messaging pivots entirely away from the woman who enabled Epstein's crimes and toward the president. The investigation into an actual convicted sex trafficker's accomplice becomes background noise. The foreground is Trump.
This is what Democrats do with oversight. They don't investigate — they redirect. Every hearing becomes a vector for the same target. Every deposition is a press conference waiting to happen. The Epstein probe exists to uncover what happened to victims exploited by a monstrous operation. Crockett turned it into a campaign ad before the microphones were cold.
Maxwell sat before the committee and refused to answer a single question. A woman convicted of conspiring with one of the most prolific predators in modern history stared down elected lawmakers and gave them silence. That should be the story. That should be the outrage.
Instead, Democrats walked out and pointed cameras at a different target entirely. Not one word from Crockett about what Maxwell's stonewalling means for the victims still waiting for accountability. Not one demand that Maxwell cooperate. Just a pivot — smooth, practiced, and aimed where the cameras already wanted to look.
The victims of Jeffrey Epstein's operation deserve an investigation that stays fixed on the people who enabled it. They don't deserve to have their suffering repurposed as ammunition in a Senate primary.