What former President Bill Clinton said during his oversight committee hearing

The House Oversight Committee on Monday released the video recordings of the testimony given by former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about their relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

The former president is the first to be compelled to testify before Congress. Others have testified voluntarily.

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The videos total a little more than nine hours of footage from their deposition on Thursday and Friday, with Hillary Clinton testifying first. Both released their opening statements before their respective testimonies began. 

What did Bill Clinton say? 

During his more than four-and-a-half-hour testimony, Clinton said there was nothing obviously wrong with Epstein when he met him after leaving the White House in 2001. 

“There’s nothing that I saw when I was around him that made me realize he was trafficking women,” the former president testified. 

He said that it wasn’t until 2008, after a court convicted Epstein of soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida, that he knew about Epstein’s crimes. Clinton also testified many times that he had never visited Epstein’s island, the location where many people alleged crimes took place. 

“I did not do that. I’ve never been to that island,” he said after one of the committee members asked if he had ever flown on a helicopter on the island.

At one point in the interview, the former president talked about an interaction he had with Donald Trump after running into him at a charity golf tournament. He said Trump asked about Epstein. 

“He somehow knew I had flown in Jeffrey Epstein’s aircraft,” Clinton testified. “And he said, ‘You know, we had some great times together over the years, but we fell out over a real estate deal.’”

When asked if Clinton took any “sexual spin on that comment” from Trump, he said, “I didn’t put any, you know, sexual spin on it.”

Other interesting parts of the testimony

About two and a half hours into the hearing, one of the committee members asks the former president about the painting Epstein had of him in a blue dress resembling the one in the Monica Lewinsky case. He said he never knew about the painting and had never seen it in person. 

“And if I had known Jeffrey Epstein had this painting, it would have saved me this whole day,” President Clinton said. 

When asked if he introduced Monica Lewinsky to Epstein, the former president said he did not. 

One of the committee members asked Clinton if Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell had ever been to his home in Chappaqua, New York. He said he couldn’t remember, but it was possible since his wife was a U.S. senator at the time and she would hold events at their home. 

Near the end of the hearing, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., asked Clinton and his attorneys if a statement used in The Daily Beast that he had allegedly made was incorrect. The excerpt from his statement that the publication used stated that Clinton had met Epstein only twice. His attorneys objected to the statement, since it was only part of Clinton’s full statement. What followed was a tense conversation between the former president’s attorneys and Mace. However, after the back-and-forth, Clinton did not answer her question.

One of the last people to question Clinton was Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., who asked him about Epstein and Clinton’s deal regarding the usage of Epstein’s private jet in the early 2000s. Earlier in the deposition, Clinton had said Epstein allowed him to use his plane if Clinton would sit down with him for an hour to talk about politics and the economy. 

“He would let me use the airplane to set up my AIDS programs around the world if I agreed to talk to him for an hour about economics and politics on every long leg,” Clinton testified. “I kept my word, and he seemed to honor his.”

At the end of the testimony, Clinton offered a final remark regarding his memory and the decades since he last interacted with Epstein. 

“I’m struggling because it’s hard to know exactly what I knew when I knew it, given what I’ve learned since,” the former president said.