Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Bill Clinton will delay their testimony before the House Oversight Committee, but the Democrats are not off the hook for providing information for the investigation into the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Both Clintons were subpoenaed to appear for a deposition before the committee regarding the couple’s relationship with Epstein and his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. Hillary Clinton’s planned Thursday closed-door appearance was postponed, as was Bill Clinton’s, scheduled for Tuesday, the Washington Examiner has learned. The subpoenas are still active, according to the committee, and Congress is working with the Clintons’ attorneys to accommodate their schedules.
Bill Clinton had high-profile run-ins with Epstein, including 17 White House visits during the former’s presidency, according to the New York Post, though less is known about Hillary Clinton’s relationship with the pair. Epstein is listed as a donor of $10,000 in 1993 to the White House Historical Association in the then-first lady’s documents that discussed renovations to the White House.
Maxwell mentioned her interactions with Bill Clinton multiple times over the course of her interview earlier this year with a senior Justice Department official, in which she claimed that the former president never went to Epstein’s famous island. Maxwell also said she never saw Hillary Clinton and Epstein together.
“President Clinton was my friend, not Epstein’s friend,” Maxwell told the DOJ at one point.
“He never, absolutely never went,” she later said of Bill Clinton going to the island. “And I can be sure of that because there’s no way he would’ve gone — I don’t believe there’s any way that he would’ve gone to the island, had I not been there. Because I don’t believe he had an independent friendship, if you will, with Epstein. I didn’t see President Clinton being interested in Epstein. He was just a rich guy with a plane.”
Later this year, in a transcribed interview conducted by the House Oversight Committee for the Epstein investigation, former Attorney General Bill Barr said there was no evidence that the former president visited Epstein’s island.
“You know, in the case of Bill Clinton, as far as I was aware, there was no evidence that he visited the island,” Barr stated. “You know, the government did not obtain any such evidence.”
But that is not the extent of the Clintons’ involvement with Epstein.
A 2002 photo surfaced, just about a year after the former president left office, of him receiving a massage from an Epstein accuser getting off a long flight to Africa on the sex offender’s plane. Bill Clinton received the massage from Chauntae Davies, then 22, who served as Epstein’s personal masseuse.
Davies told the Daily Mail of the interaction, “Although the image looks bizarre, President Clinton was a perfect gentleman during the trip, and I saw absolutely no foul play involving him.” She has come forward as a victim of Epstein’s, saying she was repeatedly raped.
Epstein’s pilot, who testified in Maxwell’s trial in 2021, listed Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton as passengers on Epstein’s private plane, adding that he would be notified if high-profile people were flying.
A Bill Clinton spokesman has admitted to the former president being aboard the plane four times but claimed that he knew nothing about the crimes being committed. Other news reports have claimed that flight logs suggest that he was aboard the plane more often. The spokesman also mentioned a visit to Epstein’s New York house in 2002, detailing that security and staff were with him.
In Bill Clinton’s 2024 memoir, Citizen: My Life After the White House, he wrote that he regrets ever meeting Epstein to talk about his foundation.
“In 2002 and 2003, President Clinton took a total of four trips on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane: one to Europe, one to Asia, and two to Africa, which included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation,” the spokesman wrote in 2019.
Just a year after the trip and his visit to Epstein’s New York home, the former president appeared to have written a birthday note to the disgraced financier in the 2003 “birthday book,” compiled by Maxwell. Bill Clinton is also mentioned again in a note written by another of Epstein’s “friends.”
“It’s reassuring isn’t it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and [illegible word], and also to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends,” Bill Clinton’s note to Epstein reads.
From 2007 to 2008, Maxwell’s nephew, Alexander Djerassi, worked on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as a policy associate. Djerassi also served under the former secretary of state as chief of staff in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Following his tenure as chief of staff, he was brought back on in 2016 to work on the transition team as Hillary Clinton was the Democratic presidential nominee, before Trump beat her in 2016.
In 2010, Maxwell attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, a year after sexual abuse accusations against her emerged. The former associate confirmed her attendance in her interview with the senior DOJ official. She claimed she attended with her then-boyfriend Ted Waitt, who was a friend of Bill Clinton.
This was not Maxwell’s last appearance at a Clinton event.
In 2013, Maxwell was honored for her ocean conservation work by the Clinton Global Initiative, two years after Bill Clinton’s staff recommended banning her from events.
Along with the many other traces of Bill Clinton’s relationship with Epstein, the sex offender kept a portrait of the former president, dressed in a blue dress and heels, in his New York residence. The dress is a reference to a similar one worn by Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern with whom Bill Clinton had an affair.
“The first I saw it was in the press,” Maxwell said of the painting in her DOJ interview, also claiming she never saw it in person.
The Clinton subpoenas came as part of a broader investigation into the Epstein case and concern from the MAGA base that the federal government has been hiding the names of powerful people caught up in Epstein’s alleged underage sex trafficking ring.
Maxwell, a former British socialite, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in luring underage girls for Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking scheme. Esptein was awaiting trial on his charges related to the sex trafficking of minors when he died in jail in 2019 in what the Justice Department has determined was a suicide.
Other high-profile officials who were called to testify have had their subpoenas withdrawn after turning over written testimony to the House Oversight Committee. Former Democratic Attorneys General Merrick Garland, Eric Holder, and former FBI Director James Comey told the House Oversight Committee they have no knowledge of files related to Epstein. In-person interviews with former Republican Attorneys General Jeff Sessions, Alberto Gonzales, and former FBI Director Robert Mueller were also canceled.
Trump, House GOP leadership, and the DOJ have sought to move past the Epstein files following the public fallout from the department’s announcement this summer that it had no plans to make any further documents available on Epstein, despite Attorney General Pam Bondi telling Fox News in February that a “client list” was sitting on her desk.
During testy exchanges with Democrats during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Bondi denied accusations that she was stopping the release of a supposed client list, in part, to protect Trump, who was friends with Epstein until a fallout around 2004.
Bondi repeated the DOJ’s position that “there was no client list” from Epstein, an assertion that has prompted a bipartisan effort by the House Oversight Committee and beyond to unearth Epstein documents.
Trump claimed that he turned down an offer to visit the island, while calling out other people the press should focus on, Bill Clinton in particular.
“I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there supposedly 28 times,” Trump said in Scotland as he sat with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “I never went to the island, but Larry Summers, I hear, went there — he was the head of Harvard. And many other people that are very big people, nobody ever talks about them.”
The committee issued 11 subpoenas for depositions earlier this year, with Hillary Clinton slated for Thursday and Bill Clinton for Tuesday. The committee intends to reschedule their depositions by working with their legal counsel.
Alexander Acosta, a former labor secretary and U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, testified before the committee last month after a separate subpoena. Acosta granted Epstein what many believe was a “sweetheart deal.”
The committee has released multiple batches of documents related to the DOJ files, many of which came from the committee’s subpoena to Epstein’s estate.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced a discharge petition to try to force a vote for a full release of the Epstein files. However, it was one signature short of forcing House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to put Massie’s Epstein transparency bill on the House floor for a vote.
After winning a special election, Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) is expected to sign the Epstein discharge petition and reach the necessary 218 signatures to compel floor action.
COMEY WON’T APPEAR BEFORE HOUSE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE AND DENIES KNOWLEDGE OF EPSTEIN FILES
Johnson has delayed Grijalva’s swearing-in, a move some Democrats have said is due to her support of the petition to release files related to Epstein. Johnson interrupted Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) speaking with reporters on Wednesday, claiming that he would swear her in when they vote to end the ongoing government shutdown.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Clintons for comment.