Former US President Bill Clinton testified on Friday as part of an investigation into a sex trafficking network set up by late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The disgraced financier visited the White House 17 times between 1993 and 1995 during Clinton’s term in office.
The former president is believed to have flown on Epstein’s private jet, nicknamed the ‘Lolita Express’, up to 26 times between 2001 and 2003.
Clinton’s deposition before the House Oversight Committee followed his wife Hillary’s nearly seven-hour testimony on Thursday. After that session, Committee Chairman James Comer told reporters he expected the former president’s deposition “will last even longer.”
“We have a lot of questions for her husband tomorrow,” Comer said, noting that Hillary Clinton responded with “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask my husband” more than a dozen times.
In an opening statement released before his closed-door deposition, Clinton insisted that he “saw nothing, and did nothing wrong.” Despite flight logs showing dozens of trips aboard the ‘Lolita Express’, Clinton claimed that his relationship with Epstein was “brief.”
Newly released Justice Department files include photographs showing Bill Clinton with Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell is currently serving 20 years in prison for sex trafficking and related offenses. One undated image shows Clinton in a hot tub next to a person whose face is redacted. Another photograph shows him swimming at night with Maxwell.
A key Epstein accuser, Chauntae Davies, was once photographed giving Bill Clinton a neck massage. Davies has stated, however, that Clinton behaved appropriately toward her.
“I had no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing. No matter how many
photos you show me,” Clinton said in his opening statement. The former president added that he would likely answer many of Comer’s questions with “I don’t recall.”
“That might be unsatisfying. But I'm not going to say something I'm not sure of,” he elaborated. “This was all a long time ago. And I am bound by my oath not to speculate, or to guess.”
Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 following his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and subsequent accusations of perjury and obstruction of justice. The Senate acquitted him in a trial the next year. Lewinsky later called their relationship “a gross abuse of power.”
The release of millions of pages of Epstein-related documents has triggered a wave of resignations across several countries. In the UK, the political fallout has been most severe. Disgraced former UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson has been arrested, and the brother of King Charles, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has been stripped of his titles and was briefly detained last week as part of the investigation, according to multiple media reports.
The United Nations Human Rights Council stated last week that abuses detailed in the released files “may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity” and demanded suspected perpetrators be prosecuted regardless of their status or wealth.