Rep. Tom Emmer highlights House Oversight work, unless it involves Epstein

The New York Times Sunday Magazine published an excerpt from “Regime Change,” the recently published book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, describing how the Trump White House treated the Jeffrey Epstein files as a political crisis to be managed rather than a criminal matter to be resolved. By the reporters’ account, senior officials — including Vice President JD Vance — met in the Situation Room to contain the fallout from a July 2025 Justice Department memo concluding there was no Epstein “client list.”

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led by U.S. Rep. James Comer, has investigated the fraud in Minnesota’s safety net programs, and has also been investigating Epstein. 

On the latter matter, it has questioned Attorney General Pam Bondi and deposed former President Bill Clinton. The committee’s chief counsel for investigations, who participated in both of those depositions, is Jack Emmer — the son of House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, Republican from the 6th District and the third-ranking Republican in the chamber.

On the Minnesota investigation, the elder Emmer has been relentless. On the committee’s Epstein work, he has said nothing.

A megaphone, used selectively

Tom Emmer has repeatedly promoted the Oversight Committee’s Minnesota fraud findings, released earlier this month. The day it dropped, he posted that Walz and Ellison “looked the other way while taxpayers were robbed blind by fraudsters,” adding that the committee’s “BOMBSHELL investigation proves this.” The next day, on his personal account, he wrote that “the House Oversight report released yesterday proves they knew about rampant fraud in our state for years.” 

Jack Emmer has played an instrumental role in the investigation: During a January 29th transcribed interview, Jack personally questioned Emily Honer, the Minnesota Department of Education’s nutrition-program director, who has testified she flagged concerns about Feeding Our Future to federal authorities as early as 2020.

Tom Emmer has amplified other committee work his son has staffed as well, crediting “the important work of @COVIDSelect” — the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, where Jack Emmer served as senior counsel in 2024.

The committee’s Epstein investigation is the conspicuous exception. Emmer is not silent on Epstein totally: he was among the 427 members who voted in November to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and he retweeted an Oversight Committee post asserting that Democrats “got caught red-handed spreading a hoax about President Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.” But in each case the frame casts the president as the aggrieved party. Absent from his feed is any post promoting the committee’s actual Epstein product — like the Bondi questioning, the Clinton deposition. In both cases, Jack Emmer led off the questioning of the famous witnesses, but apparently this wasn’t worth a public acknowledgment from his father.   

Who is Jack Emmer?

Jack Emmer, 34, a 2021 University of Minnesota Law graduate, is chief counsel for investigations on the Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. He began on Capitol Hill in 2017 as a staff assistant to Rep. Francis Rooney, R-Fla.; served a brief 2020 fellowship with Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C. — described by MinnPost as an “Emmer pal”; and joined Oversight as counsel in early 2023.

House disbursement records compiled by LegiStorm show he was a senior counsel on the committee into March 2025, then left for the Transportation Department’s Office of the General Counsel — where his former House boss, Sean Duffy, now serves as secretary — before returning to Oversight in November 2025 as chief counsel for investigations. In the released Bondi transcript, he opens the questioning by name: “My name is Jack Emmer, and I am chief counsel for investigations.”

(There is no violation of the federal anti-nepotism law. The statute, and the House Ethics Committee’s guidance, bar a member from hiring or promoting a relative on the member’s own staff or on a committee the member chairs. Tom Emmer neither sits on nor chairs Oversight; he was waived onto the panel to question Walz and Ellison when they testified in March. Comer’s committee, not Emmer, employs Emmer’s son.)

The two tracks

The contrast runs alongside the administration’s own posture. When the committee produced findings that aligned with the White House’s priorities, the response was immediate: Vance announced on June 8 that he had referred Walz and Ellison to the Justice Department, and Emmer amplified the report within hours. When the same committee, staffed by the same investigations counsel, produced depositions touching the subject that the Times reports the White House wanted contained, Tom Emmer was silent.

Walz and Ellison have rejected the Minnesota report. A Walz spokesman called the committee’s work “nothing more than a joke,” and Ellison’s office characterized the referral as a political stunt. Emmer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.  The report’s own record is not uniform on the point: in the same interview that was conducted by Jack Emmer, Honer testified that her division “used all of the tools within our authority” on Feeding Our Future and attributed the failure to stop the payments to federal agencies — the USDA and its inspector general — that she said did not act on Minnesota’s warnings.

The Minnesota case at the center of the report is the Feeding Our Future scheme, which the Justice Department has called the largest pandemic-relief fraud it has charged. Its convicted ringleader, Aimee Bock, was sentenced in May to 500 months — more than 41 years — in prison.

The Oversight Committee’s Epstein inquiry is ongoing, and the depositions at its center are still run by Jack Emmer.