Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House Oversight Committee on Thursday she has no new information about Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, criticizing 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 the opening statement, which she posted on X and delivered during a closed-door hearing with lawmakers.
She accused the panel of engaging in partisan "fishing expeditions" by forcing her and her husband to sit for depositions, and said they are 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.
President Donald 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.
Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., 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 will be videotaped, is taking place in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons have a house. The committee will meet with former President Bill Clinton on Friday for a similar deposition.
Comer said it was "going to be a long video and a long deposition," and the deposition of the former president will be "even longer."
The top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., said that "today sets a precedent" that he hoped would lead to a testimony from Trump.
"We want to talk to former President Bill Clinton, and the other person we want to talk to is current President Donald Trump," he said, calling on his Republican colleagues to help them get the president "in front of our committee."
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 they 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 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 she was introduced to him by a mutual friend after he left office in 2001. She said she met Hillary Clinton at some point in either Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, and "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.
