Clintons maintain ignorance of Epstein sex crimes in House depositions

WASHINGTON (CN) — In a marathon deposition last week, former President Bill Clinton detailed his relationship with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein but assured lawmakers he was in the dark about the late Epstein’s crimes, according to video footage released by the House Oversight Committee.

And, in footage of her own interview with members of Congress, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — amid questions about UFOs and the Pizzagate conspiracy theory — said she could not remember having ever met Epstein.

Lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee traveled to Chappaqua, New York, last week to question the Clintons as part of the panel’s sweeping investigation into Epstein and his extensive web of wealthy and powerful contacts. Former President Clinton had a well-documented relationship with the disgraced New York financier — his name appears several times in recently published Justice Department documents from its own probe into Epstein.

But, in a roughly four-hour video of Clinton’s testimony to House lawmakers, published by the Oversight Committee’s Republican majority Monday afternoon, the 42nd president said he only learned of Epstein’s crimes after he was prosecuted in 2008, five years after Clinton said he ended his relationship with the man.

Clinton told the committee he first met Epstein around 2002, after his tenure in the White House. The former president said he was connected with Epstein following a call with Larry Summers, his former economic adviser, treasury secretary and Harvard professor who documents show had a close relationship with the late financier.

“He said that he was calling because of a man named Jeffrey Epstein who had made a substantial commitment of several million dollars — I think it was 10 — to brain research, and that he was an information-hungry person,” said Clinton. “He wanted to spend some time talking to me about economics and politics.”

The former president said Summers had told him about Epstein’s “massive airplane” and that that Epstein would take Clinton and his staff on trips to help him establish a global network aimed at increasing access to AIDS medicine.

“I thought, boy, that would be great,” said Clinton. “And so we followed up and took the trips.”

Clinton told the Oversight Committee that he took his last flight with Epstein in 2003 and that his relationship with the disgraced financier ended “after a year or two.”

“I thought Mr. Epstein was an interesting man, but I didn’t think he was really interested in what I was doing,” the former president opined. “I though I had done what I promised to do, he had done what he promised to do. I thought that we’d done enough, and it’s time to start working with other people.”

Clinton acknowledged that he had a “more extensive” relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s one-time partner and co-conspirator. But he estimated that he had not seen her in a decade. “It’s been 10, 12 years since I saw her,” he said. “I don’t remember when the last time was.”

The former president also categorically denied accusations that he visited Epstein’s island compound in the U.S. Virgin Islands or that he had interacted with underage girls while there.

And he appeared unconvinced by the suggestion that Epstein had been working as an intelligence operative at the behest of the U.S. or a foreign government, saying he did not know whether he or Hillary Clinton has been targeted by an “intelligence gathering operation” but that he would be “surprised” to learn such an accusation was true.

The Oversight Committee on Monday also published another four-hour footage reel from the former secretary of state’s deposition before lawmakers last week, during which she maintained she’d never met Epstein despite his appearance at a White House event held in the late 1990s.

“I was told that he attended an event at the White House that was put on by the White House Historical Association, but I have no recollection of that,” she told the committee.

Though she spent several hours getting grilled on her husband’s relationship with Epstien, Clinton also faced some unusual lines of questioning from lawmakers who attended the deposition. At one point, Missouri Representative Eric Burlison asked for her opinion on recent efforts to declassify government documents related to unidentified aerial phenomena, UAPs, once commonly referred to as UFOs.

Burlison has been one of the more vocal lawmakers behind calls to publish UAP files — sponsoring an ill-fated amendment to an annual defense authorization bill that would have forced their release. During last week’s deposition, he pointed to comments made by Clinton aides during her 2016 presidential campaign that she would declassify UAP documents if elected.

A bemused Clinton told Burlison that she was “pleased” to see the government move toward declassifying UAP documents. “This is an issue of real importance to so many people, and I think whatever can be disclosed should be disclosed,” she said.

In one more tense moment, the former secretary of state chided Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert, who attempted to tie Epstein documents to the debunked 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which accused Clinton and other prominent figures of running a child sex trafficking ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria.

Clinton, shaking her head, said the Pizzagate theory had been “totally made up” and slammed it as an “outrageous allegation that ended up hurting a number of people.”

In December 2016, a North Carolina man armed with an AR-15 rifle entered the Washington pizzeria implicated in the Pizzagate theory and fired three shots inside the restaurant. He said at the time he was investigating accusations that children were being held in the pizzeria’s basement — though the restaurant had only one floor.

“I can’t believe you’re even referencing it,” Clinton fumed at Boebert.

It wasn’t the only time during her deposition that the former secretary of state found herself at odds with the Colorado Republican. Proceedings ground to a screeching halt after news broke that Boebert had sent photos of Clinton to right-wing media personality Benny Johnson, who published them in an apparent violation of the interview’s closed-door policy.

The footage released Monday by the Oversight Committee provides a new look into the moment when lawmakers and Clinton realized the breach had taken place.

“I’m done with this,” Clinton said. “If you guys are doing that, I am done. You can hold me in contempt until the cows come home. This is just typical behavior.

Boebert has said that Johnson had done “nothing wrong,” though she did not address whether she violated House rules by sending images from inside Clinton’s deposition. Johnson at the time accused the former secretary of state of trying to “weasel” out of answering questions about Epstein.

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