Clinton faces grilling from lawmakers over his connection to Jeffrey Epstein
Former President Bill Clinton is testifying on Friday before members of Congress investigating convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, answering for his connections to the disgraced financier from more than two decades ago.
The closed-door deposition in Chappaqua, New York, will mark the first time a former president has been compelled to testify to Congress. It comes a day after Clinton’s wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sat with lawmakers for her own deposition.
Bill Clinton has also not been accused of any wrongdoing. Yet lawmakers are grappling with what accountability in the United States looks like at a time when men around the world have been toppled from their high-powered posts for maintaining their connections with Epstein after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges in Florida for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.
Hillary Clinton told lawmakers that she had no knowledge of how Epstein had sexually abused underage girls and had no recollection of even meeting him. But Bill Clinton will have to answer questions on a well-documented relationship with Epstein and his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, even if it was from the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Hillary Clinton said Thursday that she expected her husband to testify that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s sexual abuse at the time they knew each other. Republicans were relishing the opportunity to scrutinise the former Democratic president under oath. “The Clintons haven’t answered many, if any, questions about their knowledge or involvement with Epstein and Maxwell,” Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, said Thursday.
“No one’s accusing, at this moment, the Clintons of any wrongdoing,” he added. Republicans finally get a chance to question Bill Clinton Republicans have wanted to question Bill Clinton about Epstein for years, especially as conspiracy theories arose following Epstein’s 2019 suicide in a New York jail cell while he faced sex trafficking charges.
Those calls reached a fever pitch late last year when several photos of the former president surfaced in the Department of Justice’s first release of case files on Epstein and Maxwell, a British socialite who was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021 but maintains she’s innocent.
Bill Clinton was photographed on a plane seated alongside a woman, whose face is redacted, with his arm around her. Another photo showed Clinton and Maxwell in a pool with another person whose face was redacted.
Epstein also visited the White House several times during Clinton’s presidency, and the pair later made several international trips together for their humanitarian work. In the lead-up to the deposition, Bill Clinton has insisted he had limited knowledge about Epstein and was unaware of any sexual abuse he committed.
“I think the chronology of the connection that he had with Epstein ended several years before anything about Epstein’s criminal activities came to light,” Hillary Clinton said at the conclusion of her deposition. Comer has pledged extensive questioning of the former president. He claimed that Hillary Clinton had repeatedly deferred questions about Epstein to her husband.
