WASHINGTON, D.C. — In what one legal scholar has called “the boldest assertion of personal privacy since the Constitution” and a second has called “a felony in a tuxedo,” billionaire investor Leon Black has done the unthinkable: he has sued the United States House of Representatives for wanting to know what he signed.

Black, a fee-paying client of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, declined to appear for a sworn deposition before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday. Instead, his lawyers filed a suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia arguing that the committee’s subpoenas, which asked him to testify and to turn over certain non-disclosure agreements, seek “private information that bears no legitimate connection to the committee’s legislative purpose.”

That is a striking framing. The committee’s legislative purpose, as reported by The Associated Press, is to investigate Jeffrey Epstein. Black is one of Epstein’s clients. The single most relevant fact available to rebut the “no legitimate connection” argument is that he, in fact, was legitimately connected to Epstein.

"I have already produced the only confidentiality agreement in which Epstein could have been involved, because it is the only one executed while he was alive."

Yes. That is the defense. As NPR noted, Black’s position is that the one agreement that matters is the one he has already handed over, and every other NDA he has ever signed is, legally speaking, a personal matter with no bearing on a dead sex trafficker’s ledger. It is, to put it mildly, a robust theory of the Fourth Amendment.

The committee, for its part, remains unmoved. “Mr. Black’s testimony is crucial to our investigation as he was one of Mr. Epstein’s fee paying clients and has several non-disclosure agreements,” a committee statement said, adding that the deposition was “moving forward this morning for the record and there will be an empty chair for Mr. Black.” An empty chair is a powerful image; a man absent from the only room in Washington where absence is itself a headline. As NBC News reported, the committee intends to hold the seat in perpetuity, or until he shows up, whichever comes first.

THE BLACK POSITION: A CRITERION SHEET

  • Contractual boundaries: Maintains that personal non-disclosure agreements are private documents, not public records, a position shared by at least one other billionaire and several lawyers who have not, to date, been sued.
  • The alive-only standard: Only one NDA qualifies for production — the one signed while Epstein was, in the committee's words, "involved." Posthumous NDAs are, per the suit, a legal fiction.
  • Proven composure: Walked out of a voluntary interview in June the moment a question touched on NDAs, demonstrating in real time precisely why the document is worth having.
  • Speed to litigation: From subpoena to lawsuit in a matter of weeks, a pace that suggests the legal team treats congressional process the way other people treat a parking ticket.

The survivors in the case have asked Congress to “use every tool available to enforce its subpoenas.” Their letter, as the Guardian described it, argues that Black’s “use of NDAs underscores why Congress must scrutinize the agreements in his possession.” In other words: the documents matter because of what they might say, and they might say something because Black went to extraordinary lengths to ensure they did not.

At press time, the committee had not responded to the lawsuit and Black had not responded to the committee, a standoff with all the hallmarks of a long and instructive case. The legal community has split evenly into two camps: those who believe Black has found a novel constitutional shield, and those who believe the shield is made of the same paper as the NDAs it is meant to protect.