[ad_1]
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, the former secretary of state, sat for over nine hours of testimony last week related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the public can now view their depositions to a Republican-led congressional committee.
The depositions took place in their Chappaqua, N.Y., hometown and included questions about Epstein — who died in 2019 in a New York City jail shortly after being indicted — and Ghislaine Maxwell, his friend who is now serving a lengthy prison sentence on a federal sex-trafficking conviction.
Here’s a look at what we learned, with the focus largely on the testimony of the 42nd president. Hillary Clinton testified she had never met Epstein, and there has never been a credible account contradicting that claim.
No knowlege of crimes, no police interviews
In an opening statement he released publicly, Bill Clinton said he had no knowledge of crimes committed by Epstein when the two men were acquainted and that had he known, “I would have turned him in myself.” He added at different points on Friday that he never saw illicit behaviour on Epstein’s plane or any girls he thought were minors.
Overall, Clinton’s deposition didn’t deviate greatly either from what he wrote about the Epstein relationship in a 2024 book or Maxwell’s own interviews with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last summer from prison.
“I didn’t see President Clinton being interested in Epstein,” Maxwell said. “[Epstein] was just a rich guy with a plane.”
WATCH | Bill Clinton’s deposition:
Clinton, too, set up the parameters of the relationship as being transactional. He said mutual contact Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary, advised him that Epstein was willing to lend his plane for use as Clinton sought to get his fledgling foundation established beginning in 2001.
In exchange, Epstein wanted some face time to discuss issues, Clinton said. Those conversations, the former president recalled, included such topics as derivatives markets and financial regulations and the prospects for prosperity in Africa.
“He did ask about economics and politics as he said he would, and he never asked me anything untoward,” Clinton said, stressing that foundation staff and the U.S. Secret Service accompanied him on the plane rides.
Epstein was indicted in Florida in 2007 on charges that led to a conviction the following year on state charges of soliciting prostitution from someone under age 18. Clinton said that given their contacts, he was a bit surprised he wasn’t contacted then, or later, by authorities.
“I don’t believe any law enforcement agency has ever asked me, and I don’t know enough to volunteer anything,” Clinton told the committee.
As for the end of the relationship, which he cited as being in 2003, Clinton said Epstein didn’t appear overly interested in his global health initiatives and that others he knew better also offered to help fly him to destinations.
“I thought I had done what I promised to and he had done what he promised to do,” Clinton said.
As for widespread theories that Epstein might have been an intelligence agent for a foreign service, Clinton said he would be surprised if that were the case.
Context for released photos
Both Clintons said the relationship with Maxwell encompassed a number of years, as did she in her prison interview. Maxwell said she was in a relationship for about seven years with Clinton friend and tech executive Ted Waitt, with the former president saying she was also interested in early Clinton Global Initiative efforts.
In a photo released as part of the millions of documents loosed by the Epstein Files Transparency Act in late 2025, Clinton is shown in a pool with Maxwell and at least one other unidentified person.
Clinton said that on a lengthy plane trip en route to Asia, there was a stopover in Brunei. The country’s sultan, known to Clinton during his time as U.S. president, encouraged the travelling entourage to unwind after their flight at their hotel pool.
“I swam around. I sat in the hot tub for five minutes or whatever it was. I got up and went to bed,” he said.
Clinton added that a Secret Service member was near the pool, and his lawyers alluded to a separate photo that exists containing several people swimming.
In another photo recently released, Clinton is seen getting a massage from a young woman in an airport lounge. By all accounts, the woman is Chauntae Davies, a former flight attendant on the private plane who years later said she was victimized by Epstein.
Asked by Democratic Rep. Melanie Stansbury whether he now regrets the photo, Clinton at first tried to push back on a picture of what he viewed as an innocent massage, with two fully clothed persons.
“She wants to know if I feel bad about it. Yes,” he said to one of his lawyers. “I wished Chauntae had told me,” he added. “I liked her.”
‘I don’t recall’
Clinton in public life has been accused of being evasive, but he predicted in his opening statement that “you’ll often hear me say that I don’t recall.”
That did happen, and one such line of questioning involved whether he was shown the bed on Epstein’s plane.
While Clinton appeared focused and aware throughout Friday’s sessions, there were several occasions when he very much appeared a nearly 80-year-old man, with an unsteady voice and shaky hands.
His lawyers frequently reinterpreted questions or explained their rationale to him. Trying to remember his frequent travels, he wondered aloud if the devastating Asian tsunami occurred in 2001 or 2002, clearly thinking about the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that took place in late December 2004.
Victim allegations denied
Clinton pushed against allegations relayed by legislators that were originally made by the late Virginia Giuffre and Maria Farmer, who said they were victimized by Epstein.
Farmer reported to police she had knowledge that Clinton was at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, and Giuffre said he had visited Epstein’s Caribbean estate. Clinton was emphatic on never having visited the St. Thomas location, but he offered a more qualified “I do not remember doing that” regarding any ranch visits.
Those inclined to doubt Clinton might point to the fact that in an early 1998 deposition, he also denied having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky while being deposed in the civil lawsuit filed by Paula Jones — which would be among the statements that led to his impeachment. Clinton faced a host of allegations of womanizing or sexual harassment, largely in the 1980s and 1990s, with Jones alleging he exposed himself to her at a hotel when he was Arkansas governor.
With respect to Giuffre, while she helped reveal Epstein’s crimes and the former prince Andrew’s relationship with Epstein, she also once levelled a false accusation of sexual abuse that she had to publicly retract involving high-profile lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
Trump-Epstein story remains fuzzy
A Washington Post report traces the origins of the Trump-Epstein split to late 2004 and a Florida real estate parcel of land.
Clinton offered a similar view when he said he spoke briefly to U.S. President Donald Trump about Epstein at a charity golf tournament hosted by former New York Yankees manager Joe Torre.
“He said they both wanted a same piece of land. He didn’t say what it was, and that’s all I remember,” Clinton said, adding the conversation did not include any discussion of sex or women. But the former president pegged the conversation with the future president as being either in 2002 or 2003, much earlier than the real estate auction.
Trump offered a different explanation last year, saying Epstein “stole” female employees from his Florida estate and that he didn’t heed a warning to stop doing that.
“People were taken out of the spa — hired by him — in other words, gone,” Trump said. “And then not too long after that, [Epstein] did it again. And I said, ‘Out of here.'”
To muddy things further, the 2020 book The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency alleges Epstein was banned from visiting Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2007 over allegations of an improper exchange with a teenage girl.
Video of closed-door hearings released
The Clintons negotiated with Republican committee chair James Comer for weeks, wanting a public hearing so that their testimony could not be misinterpreted.
While that desire was understandable, it’s also true that Hillary Clinton knows firsthand how public congressional hearings can turn into spectacle — with grandstanding comments by several legislators carried live by news networks as she once sat for nearly 12 hours at a 2015 congressional hearing into attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
WATCH | Hillary Clinton deposition got off to rocky start after photo leak:
But with a few exceptions — for example, she exploded last week after her photo was leaked and was dumbfounded that a Republican asked about the nearly deadly Pizzagate conspiracy theory — the depositions proceeded in a largely professional and straightforward manner, with a lack of shouting and lawyers sometimes interrupting for clarifications of questions.
The contrast was also seen recently in how a largely sedate closed-door session with former special counsel Jack Smith transpired, compared with a more contenious public hearing.
With video of their depositions released within two business days, the Clintons can now be seen and heard without Capitol Hill histrionics.
[ad_2]
Source link