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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House Oversight Committee during roughly six hours of testimony Thursday that she has no new information about Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, and she criticized Republicans’ handling of their investigations into the late convicted sex offender.
“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 offices,” she said in her opening statement, which she posted on X and delivered at a closed-door hearing with lawmakers.
After the interview, Hillary Clinton told reporters that she “answered every one of their questions as fully as I could” and that those questions “were repetitive.” The answers, she said, were that “I never met Jeffrey Epstein” and “I knew Ghislaine Maxwell casually, as an acquaintance.”
“I don’t know how many times I had to say I didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein,” she said, adding that the session took an odd turn toward the end, when one of the members asked her about UFOs and the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory.
Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., said the interview was “productive.” “I think we learned a lot,” he said, adding that on some questions involving the Clinton Global Initiative, Hillary Clinton told lawmakers, “You have to ask my husband.”
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said Hillary Clinton “took every question from every single member” on both sides of the aisle.
In her opening statement, the former first lady accused the panel of engaging in partisan “fishing expeditions” by forcing her and her husband to sit for depositions and said it was interviewing the wrong people.
“[Y]ou have compelled me to testify, fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation, in order to distract attention from President Trump’s actions and cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers,” she wrote in the statement.
“If this committee is serious about learning the truth about Epstein’s trafficking crimes, it would not rely on press gaggles to get answers from our current president on his involvement; it would ask him directly under oath about the tens of thousands of times he shows up in the Epstein files,” the statement said.
Trump has never been charged with any wrongdoing connected to Epstein and has denied any wrongdoing. The Clintons have also repeatedly denied wrongdoing related to Epstein and have not been accused of any crimes in connection with him.
Comer told reporters before the interview that “this isn’t a partisan witch hunt. This was a motion, a bipartisan motion, supported by the Democrats, to bring the Clintons in. So I don’t think it’s any type of being unfair in any way to the Clintons.”
The interview, which was videotaped, took place in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons have a house. The committee will meet with former President Bill Clinton for a similar deposition Friday.
Comer said Hillary Clinton’s appearance was “going to be a long video and a long deposition” and that the deposition of the former president will be “even longer.”
A source familiar with the situation told NBC News that Thursday’s questioning was briefly paused after conservative influencer Benny Johnson posted two pictures of Hillary Clinton during the questioning on social media, which he said were shared with him by Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo. NBC News reached out to both sides of the committee for comment on the delay.
“Benny did nothing wrong. Proceeding with deposition,” Boebert said on X a short time later.
The top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Robert Garcia of California, told reporters during a midafternoon break that what Boebert did was “completely against the rules” and that there should be “repercussions.”
Hillary Clinton said afterward that what happened was “very upsetting,” because it suggested that Republicans might violate other rules that had been agreed upon. She said the session resumed after there were reassurances that there would not be any more incidents.
Speaking to reporters throughout the day, Democrats on the committee said they hoped that deposing the Clintons would open the door to deposing other prominent politicians named in the files, including President Donald Trump.
“This committee has now set a new precedent about talking to presidents and former presidents, and we’re demanding immediately that we ask President Trump to testify in front of our committee and be deposed in front of Oversight Republicans and Democrats,” Garcia said. “And that should happen immediately.”
The in-person interviews come after months of bitter back-and-forth between the former first couple and the committee, which at one point threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena it issued in August.
The committee initially scheduled their depositions for October. Comer has accused them of having given the panel the runaround since then.
“We worked for six months to get the Clintons to come in,” Comer said.
The Clintons had volunteered to testify at a public hearing, but Comer said the committee’s practice is to conduct closed-door interviews with witnesses before it holds hearings.
“We’re going to release the transcripts, release the video as soon as everyone approves it,” Comer said.
“No one has accused the Clintons of wrongdoing,” he added, but we’re “trying to understand many things” about how Epstein operated.
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee who lost the presidential election to Trump in 2016, has said she and her husband have little information to offer the panel about Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 as he was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. She has accused the committee of using her and her husband to try to distract from Trump’s ties to Epstein.
Undated photographs of Bill Clinton with Epstein and Maxwell were released in December in the first tranche of documents made public under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a 2025 law that requires the Justice Department to make public its investigative files relating to Epstein and Maxwell.
It’s unclear where the photos were taken. Bill Clinton’s spokesperson, Angel Ureña, has said he traveled on Epstein’s plane four times in 2002 and 2003 on trips for his Clinton Foundation.
It’s also unclear whether Hillary Clinton, who did not go on those trips, ever met Epstein, who pleaded guilty in Florida to a state charge of soliciting a minor in 2008 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. She told the BBC this month that she does not believe she met him.
Hillary Clinton did, however, know Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 of federal sex trafficking charges, including conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts. Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
In an unusual interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last year, Maxwell said that “President Clinton was my friend, not Epstein’s friend,” and that she was the one who asked Epstein to let Bill Clinton and other foundation members and guests use his plane in 2002.
It’s unclear when Maxwell first met the former president. She said a mutual friend introduced them after he left office in 2001. She said that she met Hillary Clinton at some point in either Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and that “I went to the house in Chappaqua a few times.”
Maxwell did not say when those trips were. She told Blanche that Bill Clinton was “very close” friends with billionaire Ted Waitt, whom she said she dated from 2003 to 2010.
Maxwell and Waitt both attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010. Maxwell was also spotted at a 2013 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City, years after she had been publicly accused in a civil suit of helping Epstein groom and sexually abuse minors.
It’s unclear when she last saw or communicated with Hillary Clinton.
In her BBC interview, the former secretary of state said that she’d met Maxwell on “a few occasions” and that “thousands of people go to the Clinton Global Initiative.”
In her interview with Blanche, Maxwell was asked when she had last gone on a trip with or seen Bill Clinton.
“It was in — was late 2000 and, I don’t know, ’16, ’17, ’18, something in — it was in Los Angeles,” she said. “I think he was hosting something or he was at an event and I was in L.A. and I had dinner with him.”
In a sworn declaration sent to the Oversight Committee last month and obtained by NBC News, Bill Clinton said, “I have no recollection of when I first met Ms. Maxwell, though I believe she was working for Mr. Epstein at the time.” He added that she “later began a personal relationship with a mutual friend.”
“I have no recollection of exactly when I last saw her, but it was many years ago,” Bill Clinton said in the declaration, which was first reported by The New York Times.
A separate declaration from Hillary Clinton used the same language about Maxwell, and both Clintons said they had “no personal knowledge” of either Epstein’s or Maxwell’s “criminal activities.”
Maxwell told Blanche that she never saw Bill Clinton or Trump doing anything inappropriate.
After her interview with Blanche, a former Trump attorney, Maxwell was transferred from a prison in Florida to a lower, minimum-security prison camp in Texas.
Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.
Ryan Nobles is chief Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC News.
Kyle Stewart is a producer and off-air reporter covering Congress for NBC News, managing coverage of the House.
Lizzie Jensen is an intern for NBC News on Capitol Hill.
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