Former Secretary of State says hearing deflects from Trump scrutiny

Hillary Clinton delivered a withering rebuke to a congressional committee investigating her supposed links to Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, accusing its Republican members of embarking on a “fishing expedition” intended to cover up and deflect attention from the actions of Donald Trump.

In a furious opening statement, the former secretary of state suggested the event was “partisan political theatre” and “an insult to the American people” while repeating her insistence that she had never met Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker who died in 2019.

“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,” she said, according to remarks she shared during the closed-door testimony.

Clinton’s onslaught came on the first day of a session that will also include a deposition by her husband, Bill Clinton, the former US president. The hearing is being staged at an arts center near the couple’s home in Chappaqua in upstate New York.

The Clintons reluctantly agreed to appear in response to a subpoena from the committee’s Republican chair, James Comer, after being threatened with contempt of Congress charges.

In her opening statement, Clinton excoriated the proceedings as “designed to protect one political party and one public official, rather than to seek truth and justice for the victims and survivors”.

Referencing her own career campaigning against sex trafficking, she added: “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. There is too much that needs to be done. What is being held back? Who is being protected? And why the cover-up?”

The hearing was temporarily suspended at the request of Clinton’s legal team after a photo of her giving testimony was shared on social media. It was later reported that the picture had been taken by Lauren Boebert, one of the committee’s Republican members. It is against the rules for witnesses or lawmakers to take pictures during closed-door congressional hearings. Democrats condemned the breach as “unacceptable”.

Boebert defended her conduct on social media after the disruption.

“No US ambassadors were harmed in the taking of today’s photo,” she wrote, in a reference to the storming of a US diplomatic compound in the Libyan city of Benghazi in 2012, which happened when Clinton was secretary of state and resulted in the deaths of four Americans.

Clinton resumed her testimony to the House of Representatives’ oversight committee shortly afterwards.

Robert Garcia, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said that during the interruption, Clinton had called for the hearing to be opened to the media.

Speaking after her committee testimony, Clinton told press gathered outside she would have preferred the testimony be public, but was distressed about agreed-upon rules being disregarded by the committee.

“They had a chance to do it in public and I wish they had done it in public,” she said, adding that she found their questions to be very repetitive. “I don’t know how many times I had to say I did not know Jeffrey Epstein,” she said. “It is on the record numerous times.”

Clinton told reporters that the questions also veered off-topic and “got quite unusual”, with questions about UFOs and Pizzagate, a repeatedly discredited conspiracy theory linking the Democratic party to a pedophilia ring.

She expressed frustration about the way the investigation was being handled. “No Republican members asked any questions about Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell to anyone else they have disposed of,” she said.

Speaking during an afternoon break in proceedings, Garcia said Clinton had answered every question and called for transcripts of her deposition to be released within 24 hours. “The American people have a right to know exactly what she said, what questions were asked of her and how she responded,” he said.

Bill Clinton is scheduled to give testimony under identical circumstances as representatives investigate links with Epstein that he has acknowledged and which are confirmed in files released by the Justice Department under congressional mandate.