(Chappaqua) Hillary Clinton, former head of American diplomacy and wife of former President Bill Clinton, testified Thursday behind closed doors before a parliamentary committee on the couple’s past links with sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, who was close to her husband.
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The members of this committee of the House of Representatives traveled for the occasion to Chappaqua, a small town north of New York where the Clintons own a house. Friday, they will hear her husband there.
A small performance hall was requisitioned for the occasion, in front of which dozens of journalists had gathered since dawn. Near an entrance, a large white tent was set up to allow the Clinton couple to get out of their car out of sight of the press.
It is this same group of parliamentarians, dominated by Republicans, who heard Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, on February 9 by videoconference from the prison where she is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sexual exploitation.
PHOTO YUKI IWAMURA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
A New Castle police officer sets up barricades outside the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center as media await the arrival of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The hearing quickly ended, Ghislaine Maxwell unsurprisingly invoking her constitutional right to remain silent.
But she “is ready to speak completely and honestly if she obtains a pardon from President Donald Trump,” said her lawyer David Markus.
Mme Maxwell would be ready in particular to testify to the fact that “President Trump and President Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing,” assured her lawyer.
Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, both 79 years old, each had ties to Jeffrey Epstein, but claim to have broken up with him well before his death in prison in New York in 2019 and to have had no knowledge of his sexual crimes.
“Nothing to hide”
“We have nothing to hide,” Hillary Clinton, 78, told the BBC in February, recalling that the couple had repeatedly called for the release of the entire Epstein dossier.
The US Department of Justice published on January 30 “more than three million pages” partly redacted from the Epstein file, affirming that the Trump administration had thus fulfilled its obligation, imposed by a law adopted in November by Congress, to shed light on this politically explosive file.
These millions of documents do not contain any element that could lead to additional prosecutions by the American justice system, immediately warned the number 2 of the department, Todd Blanche, former personal lawyer of Donald Trump.
But since their publication, numerous leaders and personalities around the world have been splashed for their past links with Jeffrey Epstein, provoking criminal investigations, arrests and cascading resignations, mainly in Europe.
The mere mention of a person’s name in the file does not imply any a priori reprehensible act on their part.
Private jet
The testimony of the Clintons ends months of battle with the Republican head of this commission, James Comer.
Initially summoned in October, Bill and Hillary Clinton refused to appear, denouncing an attempt by Republicans to divert attention from the past proximity between Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.
Threatened by the commission with prosecution for obstructing Congress, the couple finally announced at the end of January that they agreed to be heard. Both demanded public hearings in vain, saying they wanted to avoid their comments being used by the Republicans.
Bill Clinton, who traveled several times aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet and was photographed numerous times in his company, claimed in 2019 that he had not spoken to him for more than a decade.
As for Donald Trump, who also appeared numerous times with Jeffrey Epstein, despite his assurances that he would “never have taken Epstein’s plane”, his name appears eight times on the plane’s passenger list between 1993 and 1996, according to an email from an investigator dating from 2020.
