Bill Clinton plans to testify that he did nothing wrong and had “no idea” about the crimes Jeffrey Epstein was committing — nor did he see anything that “ever gave me pause” — according to his prepared opening statement to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
“As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing — I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals,” the former president said in his statement, which he posted on X.
The prepared remarks also lambasted the Republican-led committee for demanding testimony from his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who spent over six hours answering questions Thursday during her own deposition.
She testified that she does not recall meeting Epstein and denied any knowledge of his sex trafficking offenses with longtime co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Whether you subpoenaed 10 people or 10,000, including her was simply not right,” he said in the statement.
In contrast to Hillary Clinton’s opening statement, which referenced Epstein and Maxwell’s “criminal activities,” Bill Clinton’s statement makes no mention of Maxwell.
The former president said he is in Chappaqua testifying in compliance with a congressional subpoena because “no person is above the law, even Presidents — especially Presidents.”
He continued, “I hope that by being here today, we can bring ourselves a little further away from the brink and back to being a country where we can disagree with one another civilly–where the search for truth and justice outweighs the partisan urge to score points and create spectacle.”
Bill Clinton has maintained he was an acquaintance of Epstein’s but stopped communicating with him at least a decade before the late financier’s arrest in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. Neither he nor Hillary Clinton has been accused of wrongdoing.
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