Bill and Hillary Clinton have said they will testify before the House Oversight Committee as part of its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Their decision reverses their long-standing refusal just days before lawmakers were set to vote on holding them in criminal contempt of Congress.

The former president and former secretary of state had spent months rejecting subpoenas issued by Representative James Comer of Kentucky, the committee's Republican chairman.

The Clintons had argued that his demands were not legally valid and accused him of using the investigation as a political weapon at the direction of President Trump.

Their position shifted after several Democrats on the committee joined Republicans in supporting a recommendation to refer the Clintons to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

It marks a rare and dramatic escalation that would have been an unprecedented move against a former first couple.

Following that vote, lawyers for the Clintons contacted Comer on Monday evening to confirm that both would sit for depositions at dates to be agreed upon, and urged the committee to abandon its plans to proceed with the contempt vote scheduled for later this week.

'They negotiated in good faith. You did not,' spokesmen for the Clintons said in a statement. 'They told under oath what they know, but you did not care. But the former president and former secretary of state will be there.'

The Clintons' decision followed a prolonged standoff with Representative James Comer, and represented a significant political win for the Republican chairman. 

The move also advanced Comer's broader strategy of redirecting his committee's Epstein investigation away from scrutiny of Trump's past connections to the financier and toward high-profile Democrats who had social or professional ties to Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.

In a letter sent to Comer over the weekend and obtained by The New York Times, attorneys for Clinton made a final attempt to shape the terms of any testimony. 

They proposed that the former president participate in a four-hour recorded interview with the full committee - a format Clinton had previously criticized as excessive and without modern precedent.

Comer rejected the Clinton's offer, calling it 'unreasonable' arguing that four hours of testimony from Mr. Clinton was inadequate given that he was a 'loquacious individual' and would look to run out the clock. 

The lawyers also requested that Hillary Clinton be allowed to submit a sworn written statement instead of appearing in person, citing her claim that she never met or communicated with Epstein. 

'Your clients' desire for special treatment is both frustrating and an affront to the American people's desire for transparency,' Comer wrote in a letter to the Clintons' lawyers on Monday in a letter that was seen by the Times. 

However, they added that she would still agree to an in-person interview if required, noting that any such session should reflect the limited relevance of her knowledge to the investigation.

Mr Clinton had asked Comer for scope of the interview to be restricted to matters relating to Epstein - but Come rejected that plea.

Comer went on to explain that he believed the former president 'likely has an artificially narrow definition in mind' of what matters would be related to the Epstein investigation.

Comer said he was concerned Clinton would refuse to answer questions about 'his personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, ways in which they sought to curry favor with powerful individuals and alleged efforts to utilize his power and influence after his presidency to kill negative news stories about Jeffrey Epstein.'

In a sharp reversal, the Clintons responded Comer's letter on Monday night by accepting every condition he had laid out, agreeing to remove any restrictions on the length of Bill Clinton's deposition or the scope of questioning Republicans could pursue.

The only concession Comer had previously been willing to make was allowing the interviews to take place in New York, where the Clintons are based.

Mr Clinton has acknowledged knowing Epstein, who died in jail in 2019, but has maintained that he never visited Epstein's private island and severed ties with him roughly 20 years ago.

But flight records show that Clinton took four overseas trips on Epstein's private aircraft in 2002 and 2003.

The Democrat claims the pair were barely buddies, denies knowledge of Epstein's sex trafficking network, and insists he never set foot on Little Saint James – nicknamed 'Pedo Island' and the setting for multiple bouts of sexual abuse.

Although several House Democrats voted alongside Republicans last month to advance contempt charges against the Clintons, others voiced strong objections - particularly over the decision to involve Hillary Clinton at all.

'I'm not seeing anything to suggest she ought to be a part of this in any way,' said Representative Kweisi Mfume, a Maryland Democrat, during a committee hearing last month. 

He added that it appeared the former secretary of state had been included simply because 'we want to dust her up a bit if we get her before this committee.'

The Clintons' eventual agreement marks a complete retreat from the hardline stance they had taken only weeks earlier, when they insisted the investigation was politically motivated and vowed to resist it indefinitely.

'Every person has to decide when they have seen or had enough and are ready to fight for this country, its principles and its people, no matter the consequences,' the Clintons wrote in a letter to Comer on January 13. 'For us, now is that time.'

Even as the contempt vote loomed, the Clintons continued to seek a compromise behind closed doors, hoping to persuade the House Oversight Committee to withdraw the subpoenas.

They proposed that Comer and the committee's ranking Democrat conduct a sworn interview with Mr Clinton, but the chairman rejected the idea, insisting instead on a full appearance before the entire panel in an open-ended, transcribed session.

According to a person familiar with the talks, a member of the Clintons' legal team even managed to obtain Comer's personal cellphone number and attempted to contact him directly in recent days to resolve the standoff but Comer never replied.

The Clintons finally agreed to participate in a transcribed interview but Comer still maintained that no agreement existed, further infuriating the Clintons and their supporters.

Last month, nine Democrats on the Oversight Committee joined Republicans in voting to advance contempt charges against Bill Clinton, while three Democrats supported doing the same to Hillary Clinton — setting the stage for potential House floor votes.

Many Democrats, however, have been wary of appearing to defend anyone connected to Epstein, particularly figures as politically polarizing as the Clintons.

For the former first couple, the episode has felt like another chapter in what they view as a decades-long campaign of Republican investigations and attacks.

In their January letter to Mr. Comer, the Clintons accused him of risking paralysis of Congress in pursuit of what they described as a partisan operation 'literally designed to result in our imprisonment.'

Bill Clinton's agreement to testify in the Epstein inquiry would place him among rare company. 

The last time a former president appeared before Congress was in 1983, when Gerald R. Ford testified about preparations for the 1987 celebration marking 200 years since the Constitution's ratification. 

By contrast, when Donald Trump was subpoenaed in 2022 by the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he responded by filing a lawsuit to block the demand, and the panel later dropped the subpoena.