For the QAnon movement and sleuths of Pizzagate – the paedophilia conspiracy theory that afflicted Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign with claims of a satanic cabal of Democratic elites and alleged torture chambers in a Washington DC pizza parlour – Thursday was to have been a day of days. The former presidential candidate and secretary of state gave evidence, under subpoena, before the oversight committee on everything she knew about Jeffrey Epstein.
But as her opening statement made clear, that wasn’t very much.
“I do not recall ever encountering Mr Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, home or offices,” she said in a blistering address that was the prelude to a six-hour session which was described by fellow Democrat Yassamin Ansari outside the hearing as “an unserious clown show”.
In England, the details of the Epstein files have led to the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the second son of British queen Elizabeth, who will live out his years under the shadow of disgrace and general loathing, and of Peter Mandelson, who recently resigned as the Britain’s ambassador to the US over his friendship with the financier.
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Another Briton, Ghislaine Maxwell, is the only person among Epstein’s sex trafficking and sexual abuse ring to have been found guilty and was moved from a high-security prison to a relatively luxurious one for reasons the US department of justice has never clarified.
Thursday’s parade of Hillary Clinton, and Friday’s deposition of former president Bill Clinton, is a coup for the Republican members of the committee, designed to humiliate the former first couple, and toss the rotten, hot potato of Epstein-related accusation and association back to the Democrats.
But in the United States, for all the outcry over full transparency on the files, there is no sign of anything approaching legal accountability for Epstein’s inner sanctum, or of any real investigation into the sexual abuse of many hundreds of minors by wealthy political and business elites who regarded the now-dead financier as a friend. The official ruling on Epstein’s death by suicide in a Manhattan prison cell has also been broadly questioned.
But although Epstein’s stench will not go away, it has amounted to little more than political jockeying in the US. Meanwhile, the scores of women who gave evidence are waiting to see whether anyone will ever be held accountable. Some of those women recently endured further trauma and an invasion of privacy when the department of justice released hundreds of images of botched redactions.
So the Hillary Clinton who turned up at the reconvened arts centre in Chappaqua was keen to turn the focus back on the role of key Republican figures in the Epstein story.
“You have made little effort to call the people who show up most prominently in the Epstein files,” Clinton told the Republican oversight committee chair, James Comer.
“And when you did, not a single Republican showed up for Les Wexner’s deposition,” she said, referring to the billionaire businessman and former GOP donor, before comprehensively laying out her political track record in combating sex trafficking around the world.
“Instead, you 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 to cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers. 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. If the majority was serious, it would not waste time on fishing expeditions.”
Even as she testified, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer gave a press conference pertaining to reports in multiple outlets, led by NPR, that 90 interview records that were listed in an evidence log and provided to Maxwell’s attorney are now missing from the tranche of files released by the department of justice. Those missing documents include three interviews with a woman who told the FBI that Epstein had sexually abused her from the age of 13 and also accused Donald Trump of sexual assault.
“Let me be blunt,” Schumer said at a news conference at the Capitol. “There is a massive cover-up going on in the justice department to protect Donald Trump and people associated with Jeffrey Epstein. We are demanding that the DOJ preserve records on what transpired behind the scenes. We want to know who was involved in the decision to hide the truth and a warning to the Trump cronies working on this and destroying evidence: you will not outrun the law. You will not outrun the truth.”
Several Epstein survivors attended the state of the union address by Trump on Tuesday night. He did not refer to the issue and in recent times has refined his remarks to claims the files show him to be “exonerated”.
Republicans are pointing out that the same Democratic lawmakers who are now crying foul chose to sit and do nothing with the Epstein files during the four years of the Biden administration. The conclusion they draw is that those lawmakers wished to protect former president Clinton from having to give the potentially humiliating evidence the oversight committee required on Friday.
The files show the former president flew on Epstein’s private plane on about 20 occasions and contain photographs of Clinton in a Jacuzzi. He has questions to answer.
Demanding the release of the files became one of the rallying cries when Trump reinvigorated the Maga movement on his way to winning back the Oval Office in 2024. The abrupt volte-face by Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi, the suspect testimony by FBI chief Kash Patel – an Epstein file release vigilante in his days as a right-wing podcast host- and the fact that commerce secretary Howard Lutnick was forced to admit he had lied in an interview about when his final meeting with Epstein occurred: none of this bodes well for the administration.
Democrats on the committee are adamant that issuing subpoenas to which the Clintons have acceded leaves the door open for depositions of cabinet members and the president himself.
The long day of what Hillary Clinton described as a “repetitive” schedule of questions from the Republicans must have caused her to revisit the surreal final months of her 2016 campaign.
“It then got at the end quite unusual because I started being asked about UFOs and a series of questions about Pizzagate, one of the most vile, bogus conspiracy theories that was propagated on the internet that was serving as the basis of a member’s questions to me,” she told reporters at the concluding of the hearing.
“So, I can only say that the best exchange that I had came at the end, when contrary to every other deposition they have taken, no Republican member asked any questions about Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell to anyone else they have deposed.”
And not for the first time in her life, Hillary Clinton was forced to answer awkward questions on behalf of her husband as she vouched for her confidence in the testimony he was due to give on Friday.
“I am. And I think the chronology of the connection he had with Epstein ended several years before anything about Epstein’s criminal activities came to light, for which he was charged and sadly given a sweetheart deal.”
On Friday, Bill Clinton denied wrongdoing and expressed regret for his association with Epstein.
“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.”
The sight of Bill Clinton walking up those steps was inevitably accompanied by footage of his subpoena by special counsel Ken Starr to appear before a grand jury to answer questions regarding his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, in 1995.
Writing a commentary piece on Thursday, Lewinsky recalled what it felt like to be 25 years old on the day in September 1998 when the Starr report was released. Stressing she was not equating her experiences with those of the girls and women abused by Epstein, she offered this perspective on the slow, circular political commotion to get answers.
“We know that the number of women abused by Epstein is north of 1,000. As a society, we are still trying to process, understand and accept the full extent of the damage inflicted by Epstein, Maxwell and their cadre of fellow abusers. And we won’t be able to do that until Congress, the courts and the culture fully gauge the breath of the abuse that is now coming to light. This is why the villainy and bile that have surfaced these past weeks are so important – all of it pushes us to keep insisting on truth and transparency.”
