Bill Clinton pictured alongside Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in a signed photo. Photo / House Oversight Committee Democrats
Bill Clinton has told Congress he “saw nothing and I did nothing wrong” with Jeffrey Epstein.
Clinton, the first former US President to be compelled to testify to Congress, said he had “no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing”.
He defended his wife Hillary Clinton, who faced her own grilling on Thursday over the couple’s links to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Clinton said he would have “turned himself in” if he had known of Epstein’s crimes.
“I had no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing. No matter how many photos you show me, I have two things that at the end of the day matter more than your interpretation of those 20-year-old photos,” he said in an opening statement.
“I know what I saw, and more importantly, what I didn’t see. I know what I did, and more importantly, what I didn’t do. I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong.”
In his opening statement, Clinton said he grew up in a home with “domestic abuse” and insisted he would not have flown on Epstein’s plane if he had an “inkling” about his criminal behaviour.
Earlier, Republicans claimed that Hillary Clinton “started screaming” as she was questioned on Thursday.
Hillary Clinton, the former US First Lady and Secretary of State, testified for more than six hours to the Republican-led House oversight committee near her home in New York.
She fielded questions about young women massaging her husband and her connections to Maxwell, the sex trafficker, in an unprecedented deposition.
Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, claimed the hearing descended into a shouting match when Hillary Clinton was asked a pointed question.
“It’s all very bizarre, but I asked her a very important question, and you’ll see that in the transcript, in the video that comes out, and you’ll see how she responded as well, screaming,” she told reporters before Clinton’s deposition on Friday.
Representative Robert Garcia, the top Democrat overseeing the committee, said the description of screaming was “beyond a mischaracterisation”.
Hillary Clinton told the committee that she did not know how Epstein had sexually abused underage girls and had no recollection of even meeting him.
But Clinton will have to answer tougher questions about his well-documented relationship with Epstein and Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year jail sentence for trafficking young girls.
Republicans have wanted to question Clinton about Epstein for years.
Those calls intensified late last year when several photos of the former President surfaced in the first release of case files on Epstein and Maxwell by the US Department of Justice (DoJ).
In 2020, the Daily Mail published a picture of Clinton, a long-time friend of Maxwell, being massaged by then 22-year-old Chauntae Davies, who later accused Epstein of abusing her.
Clinton, who admitted to travelling on Epstein’s private plane, wrote in his memoir that he had “stopped contact” with Epstein before he was first arrested in 2005 on suspicion of child sex crimes.
However, images and flight logs released to the public as part of the DoJ’s release of the files have raised doubts over the claims.
Flight logs show that Clinton made at least 27 trips on Epstein’s private jet, the Lolita Express. In one trip, he was pictured with his arm around a woman with her face redacted.
Other photographs released by the DoJ showed Clinton and Maxwell in a pool with another person whose face was blurred to protect their identity.
Officials treated every woman depicted in images or videos uncovered in the Epstein files as a victim and redacted them, except Maxwell.
Epstein also visited the White House 17 times during Clinton’s presidency and the pair later made several international trips together for their humanitarian work.
In the lead-up to the deposition, Bill Clinton has insisted he had limited knowledge about Epstein and was unaware of any sexual abuse he committed.
“I think the chronology of the connection that he had with Epstein ended several years before anything about Epstein’s criminal activities came to light,” Hillary Clinton said at the conclusion of her deposition on Thursday.
Among the questions asked was whether Maxwell attended her daughter Chelsea’s wedding. Speaking to reporters following the hearing, Hillary Clinton said Maxwell was a guest’s “plus-one”.
Hillary Clinton was also asked about UFOs and “Pizzagate”, the conspiracy theory that the world’s elite are running a child sex-trafficking ring.
At one point the hearing was briefly paused after an image of Hillary Clinton testifying under oath was leaked by Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado.
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