The committee accused Black of defying subpoenas as part of its investigation into the late Jeffrey Epstein.
Page A2From§Eachthe early bird edition — 16 September 2026
THE SUBPOENA
Leon Black sues to block Epstein subpoenas; House skips the roll call and holds him in contempt anyway.
As it ran on the front
My nephew's in his second year of law school now, and I called him up because I wanted to understand something about procedure — that's his word, procedure, he says it like it means something. I said, explain a subpoena to me like I'm your uncle, because I am. He walked me through it patient as anything. A subpoena's an order, he said. Not a request. A committee sends it, you show up, or you tell a judge why you shouldn't have to. That part I understood fine.
So here's what I've got written down from the wires, not my notebook, just what the papers had. September third — NBC, ABC, The Hill, CBS, all four of them — Leon Black, the private equity fellow, founder of Apollo, files a lawsuit against the House Oversight Committee. He's trying to stop them from enforcing subpoenas tied to their Epstein investigation. CBS says he'd been subpoenaed back in June, after he walked out early on a voluntary appearance. The Hill says he was actually supposed to sit for a deposition that same Thursday he filed. So the lawsuit and the deposition, same day. I keep turning that over.…
…(cont) Then September sixteenth. Thirteen days later. The House votes to hold him in contempt of Congress. NBC and the Times both use the same word for how the vote went — unanimous. The Times adds something CBS didn't say and NBC didn't say either: no formal roll call. They just agreed. And the Times notes this happened right before lawmakers left Washington to campaign for the midterms.
I'm sorry, I keep going back to this, but thirteen days. A man sues an entire committee of Congress to make a subpoena stop, and thirteen days later that same committee finds him in contempt of Congress without so much as a formal count of who said what. My nephew tells me a roll call's not decoration. It's a clerk reading every name out loud, one at a time, so there's a record of who stood where. That takes time. Time they apparently didn't have.
I know I already brought this up, so forgive me, but I keep thinking about what actually gets carried when a vote like that happens the regular way. My nephew says in the old days it was a physical tally sheet, clerk walking it desk to desk, member to member, somebody's hand on it the whole time. I think about that because I've got a toolbox on my porch with a lid that doesn't sit right unless you set it down flat and hold it a second — you can't rush it, is what I'm saying. A roll call is the same kind of object. It has to be carried. This one, apparently, didn't get carried anywhere.
And look, I don't want to make more of the thirteen days than what's on the page. A man files a suit September third. He's found in contempt September sixteenth. The vote is unanimous, say two papers. No roll call, says the third. That's what I've got, and I'm sorry, one more time, because it's the last angle I've got on it.
Excuse me — before you go — one more thing. The lawsuit Mr. Black filed was to make the subpoenas stop. The vote on September sixteenth wasn't a subpoena. It was a finding. Nobody in that room, near as I can tell, disagreed enough to put their name on a piece of paper saying so — because there wasn't a piece of paper. So my question is just this, and it's the only one I've got left: when a man sues to stop the count, and the House responds by not counting, which one of them got what they asked for? I wrote it down. Without so much as a roll call.
“A guy sues an entire committee of Congress to make a subpoena go away, and Congress's answer is to not even bother counting hands before they nail him for contempt — same week they're all racing to the airport for campaign season. Nobody needed convincing, so nobody needed a record. That's not chaos, that's efficiency, and efficiency in Washington means somebody already knew the outcome before the room got quiet.”
“Look, a citizen challenging a subpoena in court is due process, that's — that's the system working exactly as designed, checks and balances, very American. And the vote being unanimous with no roll call, that's not a cover-up, that's Congress being efficient before a recess, saving the taxpayer time and — did I say taxpayer time? They were leaving for campaign flights. Forget the efficiency thing.”
The receipts
The billionaire investor had refused to appear for a deposition and turn over documents to a key panel investigating Jeffrey Epstein.
The House of Representatives voted unanimously Wednesday to find billionaire Leon Black in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas related to a congressional probe into the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
· Billionaire Leon Black sues House Oversight Committee over Epstein probe subpoenas from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Leon Black sues House Oversight Committee over subpoena in Epstein probe from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Billionaire Leon Black challenges House subpoena for Epstein testimony from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Billionaire Leon Black sues House Oversight Committee over Epstein probe from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Leon Black lawsuit delivers setback to House oversight committee’s Epstein investigation from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Leon Black defies House subpoena, sues committee over Epstein probe from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.