Leon Black refuses to answer questions on NDAs at Jeffrey Epstein hearing, Rep. Comer says

Former Apollo Global Management CEO Leon Black refused to answer questions about non-disclosure agreements that he is party to during testimony about his dealings with the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before a House committee on Friday, the panel's Republican chairman said. Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the chairman, said he had issued two subpoenas to Black, "one for all the NDAs that he is party to, and second for a deposition on July 16." "This is a result of refusing to answer specific questions about the ... NDAs, and the terms we believe that information is vital to our investigation," Comer told reporters after the hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. "I will remind everyone that Mr. Black came in voluntarily, but they are refusing to disclose that, so I have issued the subpoena, and we are handing it to him as we speak," Comer said. Comer earlier had told reporters that the committee was "pretty confident" Black had signed non-disclosure agreements with some of the victims. Black walked out of the interview after having taken a long break when he was given the subpoenas. In a prepared opening statement to the panel, the billionaire Black praised Epstein's financial acumen, even as he said he had no knowledge of the late money manager's serial sexual abuse of underage girls and young women. "Epstein solved a massive estate problem for me, that none of the experts and lawyers I consulted had been able to solve," Black told the committee, according to a copy of his statement obtained by CNBC. "It was a problem that would have destroyed enormous value for my family and in Apollo, the company I had founded," Black said. Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a Virginia Democrat who sits on the committee, said, "This is the first time that someone actually walked out in the middle of [an interview], and it's because we had very important questions about Leon Black's past with Jeffrey Epstein." "This is also the first time I heard someone gush poetically about how smart and how great Jeffrey Epstein was," Subramanyam said. Another Democrat on the panel, Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, said, "I think the fact that Leon Black left today is extremely telling." "We've gone through a number of these interviews, and I believe we've had a number of witnesses who have not been credible, who have lied to the committee over and over again, Ansari said. "But today was even different than that. John Black was arrogant, he was smug." Black's lawyer, Susan Estrich, in her own comments to reporters, called the issuance of the subpoenas "a premeditated political decision." "I want to be clear, as Mr. Black said .... He never abused a woman, never was with an underage woman, he never engaged in sex traffic, he never paid Epstein for access to women, he was never blackmailed by Epstein," Estrich said. "Mr. Black had no knowledge of any of Mr. Epstein's heinous conduct." Black, in his prepared opening statement, said Epstein duped him out of more than $60 million in financial advisory fees by falsely claiming that they were tax-deductible. Black says he had no involvement in Epstein's sex-trafficking operation and did not pay him for access to women. He said he was misled by Epstein's Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, according to a prepared opening statement, which was shared with CNBC. "And Dechert examined the services Epstein rendered and determined that Epstein performed highly valuable and legitimate tax and estate planning services for my family office; that the tax work was responsible for billions of dollars in savings, and that all of Epstein's work had been vetted by reputable law and accounting firms." Black said Epstein had told him the fees he was paying him "were tax-deductible, '60-cent dollars', which I only learned years later was not true." "I.e. what I believed to be $95 million of net fees paid to him over five years was actually $158 million," Black said. "But, at the time I was led to believe by Epstein that I was paying '60 cent dollars.' That assurance was false." Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the committee's ranking Democrat, told reporters that what Black paid Epstein is "an enormous amount of money, and Jeffrey Epstein would not have been able to commit horrific crimes without the support of Mr. Black." Black said he met Epstein in the mid-1990s when Epstein was on the board of Rockefeller University. "His network included respected luminaries such as David Rockefeller; Ehud Barak, Larry Summers; George Mitchell, Bill Richardson, and Ace Greenberg," Black said. He said he knew Epstein for 18 years "before I paid him a dime." Black said he began paying Epstein in 2013 for "his bona fide advice" on tax, insurance, and trusts and estates matters, subjects that he said Epstein possessed "remarkable acumen" about. "With the benefit of hindsight, I now know, as does the world, that Epstein was engaged in horrific, sordid activities," Black said. "I feel terrible for Epstein's victims." — CNBC's Irit Skulnik contributed to this article