334. The Testimony
Leon Black walked out of a House hearing on the Epstein investigation after refusing to answer questions about NDAs.
An NDA is a document. It is a contract between two parties in which one of them agrees not to discuss certain things. The value of an NDA is that the discussion does not happen. The NDA makes the discussion legally risky, and people tend not to do legally risky things, and so the thing goes undiscussed. This is the product. It works well in its natural habitat, which is anywhere except a Congressional hearing.
A Congressional hearing is a room where things are discussed. The discussion is the purpose of the room. Congress has mechanisms for compelling people to participate in the discussion, including subpoenas, which are formal invitations with legal weight, and contempt proceedings, which are what happens when you treat the formal invitation as optional. The room is designed to work regardless of what you would prefer.
(NDAs are not, traditionally, one of the mechanisms Congress recognizes as a reason not to answer. This is listed in the things that are known about NDAs. It is possible Leon Black did not receive this information. It is possible he received it and assessed the situation differently. He has access to very good advisors, most of whom went to the same schools and charge accordingly. The advisors presumably shared a view on how this would go.)
He declined to answer the questions about the NDAs. Then he left.
This is technically allowed as an initial decision. What follows from it is a process, and the process tends to work the way the room was designed to work. Congress has, historically, taken a narrow view of the principle that certain rooms are rooms you can simply leave.
Leon Black managed a private equity firm for many years. He is an experienced man. He has survived complicated situations before. He walked into the room, determined that answering questions about agreements not to discuss things was not something he would be doing, and walked out.
He is not the first person to discover that Congress is a room and not a suggestion. He may find that contempt, like an NDA, is a word with more applications than expected.