Lesley Groff (C), a former assistant to Jeffrey Epstein, arrives to testify at a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill on June 09, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Lesley Groff, the former executive assistant to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, began a transcribed interview on Tuesday morning by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee behind closed doors.
Groff’s appearance before the committee comes a day before Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is due to speak to the same panel, which for months has interviewed a range of high-profile people connected to Epstein.
“I never saw anything improper,” Groff told the committee, according to a source familiar with the matter who was cited by MS NOW.
Groff denied she knew about Epstein’s crimes, the source said.
Groff worked for Epstein for nearly 20 years, and her name appears more than 150,000 times in the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice. Groff was responsible for arranging Epstein’s meetings with prominent people and scheduling massages for him from women, MS NOW noted.
Neither Groff nor Gates has been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, who killed himself in August 2019 in a federal jail in New York, weeks after being arrested on child sex trafficking charges.
Groff’s interview was attended for an unknown reason by House Chaplain Margaret Grun Kibben, who does not normally attend such proceedings.
Groff’s attorney, Michael Bachner, has said “She had no criminal involvement with Epstein.”
“Lesley is simply disgusted by Epstein’s conduct and is heartbroken by what his victims endured,” Bachner said in March, MS NOW reported.
Rep. James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the committee, told MS NOW the panel has referred two names of individuals to the Department of Justice. He did not identify them.
“I think the interviews that we’ve done have been very productive,” Comer told reporters on Tuesday morning.
“We’re bringing in the most important people in the whole Epstein criminal enterprise that are still alive, and hopefully we’ll get the proof to the American people that there’s an opportunity for accountability,” Comer said.
Asked if the committee would subpoena acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Comer said the panel’s Democrats already had the chance to question Blanche when he and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed the committee on the DOJ’s so-called Epstein files in March.
President Donald Trump on Monday formally nominated Blanche as attorney general, a post that requires Senate confirmation. Trump fired Bondi in April over displeasure with her handling of the controversy over the Epstein files.
Congress in November passed a bill over Trump’s objection that required the DOJ to release all of its documents related to Epstein. Trump quickly signed that bill into law, and the DOJ has released millions of Epstein case documents, but Blanche said on Jan. 30 that the DOJ had withheld about 2.5 million more and would not release any more.
Victims of Epstein objected to the DOJ’s decision.
Bondi, when she was interviewed by the House Oversight committee two weeks ago, said she had assigned Blanche to handle the release of the files.
Trump was a longtime friend of Epstein before the two men had a falling out in early 2000s.
Blanche is Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer.
