Representative James Comer, the Republican who chairs the House committee on oversight and government reform, announced that he would be asking Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Epstein’s former attorney, to appear before the panel as part of its investigation into the late sex offender.

“I am going to ask Alan Dershowitz to come in, we will have questions for him and we will give him an opportunity to come in,” Comer said on Wednesday morning, adding that the decision was based on the testimony of Lesley Groff, Epstein’s longtime assistant, who testified before the committee on Tuesday, as well as “a meeting that I had afterwards with several of the Epstein survivors”.

“We will have questions for him and we will give him an opportunity to come in and answer several questions that arose yesterday based on Ms Groff’s testimony and some things that someone of the Epstein survivors said,” Comer said.

The transcript of Groff’s testimony has not yet been released by the committee. In her opening statement, Groff told the lawmakers that she had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes while working for him and described her former employer as a “master manipulator and deceiver”.

Dershowitz defended the disgraced financier after he was first arrested and was a member of Epstein’s legal team that negotiated Epstein’s now-controversial 2008 plea deal. And in 2014, Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein survivor, alleged that Dershowitz sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager as part of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. Dershowitz has strongly denied those claims and has never been charged with any wrongdoing related to Epstein. Giuffre sued Dershowitz in 2019, alleging that he defamed her when denying her claims, but dropped the lawsuit in 2022, and said that she “may have made a mistake” in accusing him.

Giuffre died in April 2025.

In a telephone interview with the Guardian on Wednesday, Dershowitz said that he had “volunteered to testify” before the House committee, pointing to recent appearances on NewsMax, in which Dershowitz said on the show that he would be willing to appear before the committee.

“I can present a much more nuanced and calibrated description of the complexity of these things,” the Harvard Law professor told the Guardian. He added: “I’m not a reluctant witness, I wanted to testify, as I said from day one, I want the truth to come out.

“Everything I did in relation to the Epstein case, I’m proud of,” he said.

Dershowitz also pointed out that the NewsMax host, Greta Van Susteren, said on her show on Tuesday that she had reached out to Comer’s office to ask about Dershowitz and his “willingness to testify” and claimed that it was her reaching out as well as his offer to testify that led to Comer requesting his testimony on Wednesday.

In response, a spokesperson from Comer’s office told the Guardian that “the House oversight committee will speak with anyone who has information about the federal government’s handling of the Epstein and Maxwell cases and their crimes.”

They added that “yesterday Lesley Groff named, when asked who else should come before the committee, Alan Dershowitz” and said that “Chairman Comer also met with survivors yesterday who also stated Dershowitz should be interviewed.”

Dershowitz told the Guardian that he “hardly knew” Groff but said that he “saw her on a couple of occasions sitting behind the desk at Epstein’s office” and said that “she arranged, I think, perhaps some flights when I was going down there to be his lawyer to speak to the US attorney or the state attorney, but I’ve never had any substantive conversations with her.”