Democrats and Republicans on the House Oversight Committee disagree on the transparency of a deposition about the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking investigation from former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, who served during President Donald Trump's first term.

Kentucky Rep. James Comer, the Republican committee chair, said he believes Barr answered all of the committee's questions and is being "very transparent."

"Barr said he's never seen any information that showed that (Trump) was in the (Epstein) files and that he would he would be shocked if there was anything pertaining to President Trump that was negative, that the Biden administration wouldn't have leaked out prior to the presidential election," Comer told reporters on Capitol Hill.

Barr is the first of many witnesses who will testify in the Congressional Epstein probe. The House Oversight panel separately issued subpoenas to eight former law enforcement leaders including other former Attorneys General, as well as former Democratic President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Virginia Democrat Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, who also serves on the Oversight committee, is more skeptical of the Trump administration and believes Barr is not being fully transparent with his knowledge of the Epstein case.

"I think the way this administration has responded makes it feel like a cover-up. And so we really want to get to the bottom of what they have," Subramanyam told reporters.

Late Monday night, the Justice Department agreed to provide to Congress documents from the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking investigation, a move that appears to avert, at least temporarily, a potential separation of powers clash.

The records are to be turned over starting Friday to the House Oversight Committee, which earlier this month issued a broad subpoena to the Justice Department about a criminal case that has long captivated public attention, recently roiled the top rungs of President Donald Trump's administration and been a consistent magnet for conspiracy theories.

A wealthy and well-connected financier, Epstein was found dead in his New York jail cell weeks after his 2019 arrest in what investigators ruled a suicide. His former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted in 2021 of helping lure teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

The House committee's subpoena sought all documents and communications from the case files of Epstein and Maxwell. It also demanded records about communications between Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration and the Justice Department regarding Epstein, as well as documents related to an earlier federal investigation into Epstein in Florida that resulted in a non-prosecution agreement.

It was not clear exactly which or how many documents might be produced or whether the cooperation with Congress reflected a broader change in posture since last month, when the FBI and Justice Department abruptly announced that they would not be releasing any additional records from the Epstein investigation after determining that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted."

That announcement put the Trump administration on the defensive, with officials since then scrambling both to tamp down angry questions from the president's base and also laboring to appear transparent.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche interviewed Maxwell at a Florida courthouse over two days last month — though no records from those conversations have been made public — and the Justice Department has also sought to unseal grand jury transcripts in the Epstein and Maxwell cases, though so far those requests have been denied.