Former US president Bill Clinton will face questions from a Congressional panel on Friday on his well-documented links to Jeffrey Epstein, as Democrats seek to shift focus onto Donald Trump’s own ties to the convicted sex offender.
Clinton features prominently throughout the latest Epstein files disclosures, with the former president insisting that he broke ties with him well before the disgraced billionaire’s 2008 conviction for sex offenses.
Being mentioned in the files released by the US Department of Justice does not imply wrongdoing, and Clinton has not been accused of a crime or formally investigated, AFP reports.
He follows his wife, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who testified on Thursday, calling for Donald Trump – who like Bill Clinton had ties with Epstein – to appear before the panel.
“If this committee is serious about learning the truth about Epstein’s trafficking crimes... it would ask [Trump] directly under oath about the tens of thousands of times he shows up in the Epstein files,” she said in an opening statement published online.
The depositions are being held behind closed doors even though the Clintons called for them to be open and televised, a move Bill Clinton denounced as akin to a “kangaroo court.”
Zohran Mamdani, New York’s mayor, met again with Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss federal funding for a housing project, and persuaded the president to release a Columbia University student detained by ICE agents.
Hillary Clinton said that, after she repeatedly told House Republicans she did not know Jeffrey Epstein, their questions got “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”.
The Federal Aviation Administration closed the airspace in an area around Fort Hancock, Texas after congressional Democrats said a military laser-based anti-drone system accidentally shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone.
Democratic leaders in the US Senate said they will also force a vote “in the coming days” on a war powers resolution to make sure any US participation in military action against Iran requires congressional authorization.
Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, called on the justice department to explain why a photograph that appears to show Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, with Jeffrey Epstein, was removed from the public database of Epstein files.
