Former US president Bill Clinton in sworn testimony released on Monday by a US congressional committee said that he had no knowledge of the sex crimes of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Clinton also said that US President Donald Trump, a one-time close friend of Epstein, “never said anything to me to make me think he was involved in anything improper with regard to Epstein either.”
Bill Clinton and his wife, former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, were deposed last week by the Republican-led US House of Representatives Oversight Committee, which is investigating Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Photo: AFP / US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
The depositions were held behind closed doors in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons reside, and the committee released videos of their testimony on Monday.
Each video is about four-and-a-half hours long.
Hillary Clinton told the panel that she did not know Epstein, and Bill Clinton said he broke ties with him before the financier’s sex crimes came to light in 2008.
Bill Clinton acknowledged during his testimony that he flew on Epstein’s private plane several times in the early 2000s for Clinton Foundation-related humanitarian work.
“There’s nothing that I saw when I was around him that made me realize he was trafficking women,” he said.
Asked by a committee member whether he ever had sexual contact with any young women or girls introduced to him by Epstein or Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking, Clinton replied: “No.”
The former president also recalled a conversation he once had on a golf course with Trump in 2002 or 2003.
“The president never — this is 20 something years ago — never said anything to me to make me think he was involved in anything improper with regard to Epstein either,” Bill Clinton said. “He just didn’t.”
He quoted Trump as saying about Epstein: “You know, we had some great times together over the years, but we fell out all because of a real-estate deal.”
Trump has given various explanations over the years for the end of his friendship with Epstein.
During her deposition, Hillary Clinton called for the panel to depose Trump about his relations with Epstein, who died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.
Hillary Clinton angrily threatened at one point to cut the deposition short after a photograph taken by a Republican lawmaker was released publicly in a breach of the rules.
“I’m done with this. If you guys are doing that, I am done. You can hold me in contempt from now until the cows come home,” she said before pounding the table with her fist.
Both Bill Clinton and Trump figure prominently in the Epstein files released by the US Department of Justice, but neither has been formally accused of any wrongdoing.
Bill Clinton has previously acknowledged extensive interactions with Epstein, but said he never visited his infamous Caribbean island where the financier allegedly trafficked young women and girls.
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