US lawmakers grill Hillary Clinton in Epstein probe

DW News · Feb 26, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Thursday testified to a US congressional committee that she does not recall ever having met disgraced financier and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Republican-led House Oversight Committee, the main investigative committee of the US House of Representatives, interviewed the former first lady behind closed doors. Clinton delivered her testimony to lawmakers who traveled to the hamlet of Chappaqua, New York, where she has a home with former President Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton said in her opening statement to the House panel that she has no new information about Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. "I had no idea about their criminal activities. I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island home or office," she said in the statement that she posted to X. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer told reporters before the deposition kicked off that he planned to release the video and the transcript of the interview after approval. High-stakes testimony puts spotlight on Clintons Hillary Clinton challenged lawmakers in her testimony, saying, "If this committee is serious about learning the truth about Epstein's trafficking crimes... it would ask [Trump] directly under oath about the tens of thousands of times he shows up in the Epstein files." Former President Bill Clinton, who had a documented friendship with Epstein and who flew on his plane a few times in the early 2000s, is set to appear for his deposition on Friday. Bill Clinton has denied wrongdoing and expressed regret for his association. The depositions are extraordinary, for compelling a former president to testify before a congressional committee and because congressional investigators have the support of Democrats who have called for transparency in Bill Clinton's associations with Epstein. The inquiry comes months after the Clintons refused to testify but relented when lawmakers moved to hold them in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena it issued in August.Trump faces calls to testify on Epstein The top Democrat on the committee, Robert Garcia, called on US President Donald Trump to testify "to answer the questions that are being asked across this country from survivors." Trump socialized extensively with Epstein in the 1990s and 2000s, before his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. But Comer said evidence gathered by the panel does not implicate Trump. Undated photographs of Bill Clinton with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were released in December in the first tranche of documents released by Trump's Justice Department. So far, the Justice Department has released more than 3 million pages of documents tied to Epstein to comply with a law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed in 2025. Edited by: Jenipher Camino Gonzalez