CHAPPAQUA, New York — Hillary Clinton appeared to offer little new or relevant information during her closed-door testimony Thursday for a House investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, according to Republicans who questioned her for hours — raising the stakes for them to pry revelations out of Bill Clinton when he sits for his deposition Friday.
The former secretary of state testified for roughly six hours under oath, fielding questions from members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about any involvement Epstein, the late financier and convicted sex offender, and longtime co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, might have had with the Clinton Global Initiative.
Hillary Clinton reiterated that she did not recall ever meeting Epstein and that she only knew Maxwell “casually as an acquaintance.” She denied knowing anything in real time about Epstein and Maxwell’s sex trafficking offenses. In fact, she repeatedly punted questions to her husband, the former president.
“I don’t know how many times I had to say I did not know Jeffrey Epstein. I never went to his island, I never went to his homes, I never went to his offices,” she told reporters after the deposition. “So it’s on the record numerous times.”
She also complained that Republicans’ questions were “repetitive,” noting how lawmakers frequently veered off topic — asking about UFOs and the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that circulated among some conservatives during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when she was the Democratic nominee.
“They asked literally the same questions over and over again, which didn’t seem to me to be very productive,” she said.
Democratic lawmakers said that proves Republicans are engaged in a political fishing expedition — Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) earlier in the day called the proceedings a “clown show” — but Republican members of the committee are using the nonresponses to tee up Bill Clinton’s forthcoming deposition Friday morning.
“The number of times that she said, ‘I don’t know, you’ll have to ask my husband,’ was more than a dozen,” Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters after Hillary Clinton’s deposition concluded Thursday.
Republican Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) also told reporters that any specific questions about the Clinton Global Initiative and the relationship the Clintons might have had with Epstein and Maxwell, who is currently in prison, could only be answered by Bill Clinton.
Neither of the Clintons have been accused of misconduct. Bill Clinton has maintained he was an acquaintance of Epstein’s but stopped communicating with him at least a decade before his arrest in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.
His spokesperson Angel Ureña also posted on social media in 2019 that Bill Clinton traveled on Epstein’s plane four times internationally in 2002 and 2003, though Secret Service details were present “on every leg of the trip.”
But Republicans are eager to make Bill Clinton their bogeyman, seizing on images of him posing with Epstein and unidentified women that are part of the files released by the Justice Department, either in response to the law passed by Congress or the subpoena issued in August by the Oversight Committee.
GOP members of the Oversight panel are also facing increasing pressure to escalate their Epstein investigation, which so far has spurred no prosecutions in the U.S. — in stark contrast to all the heads rolling across the Atlantic. The global fallout includes the recent arrests in Britain of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, and ex-ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson, not on allegations of sex crimes but rather on suspicions of misconduct in public office.
The committee’s focus on the Clintons, however, is fueling accusations from Democrats that the GOP is deflecting from President Donald Trump’s own ties to the convicted sex offender — especially after news reports this week found the DOJ may have withheld FBI case records of allegations that Trump allegedly sexually abused a minor.
Trump has maintained he had a falling out with Epstein years before his 2019 arrest and had no part in Epstein’s criminal activities.
Speaking to reporters multiple times during breaks in Hillary Clinton’s deposition, Comer stated that the president has already answered “hundred if not thousands of questions” about his relationship with Epstein.
The Justice Department told NPR any files that were not published are privileged, duplicates or related to an ongoing investigation.
Democrats remain unimpressed.
Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, appeared to suggest Thursday that Democrats would attempt to subpoena Trump next year for information, should their party reclaim the House majority in the midterms.
“This committee has now set a new precedent about talking to presidents and former presidents,” Garcia told reporters. “And we’re demanding immediately that we ask President Trump to testify in front of our committee and be deposed in front of oversight Republicans and Democrats.”
