Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly threw her husband, former President Bill Clinton, under the bus during her six-hour closed-door deposition Thursday.
Hillary repeatedly told the House Oversight Committee more than a dozen times to “ask my husband” when pressed on his close friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The response drew sharp criticism from conservatives. Bill Clinton will give his own testimony under oath on Friday.
Hillary Clinton appeared before the Republican-led committee in New York, where she spent roughly six hours fielding questions about her and her husband’s connections to the the late financier and their links to Epstein’s pedophile sex trafficking ring for the global elite.
The deposition covered Epstein’s financing of the Clinton Global Initiative, Clinton’s longtime friendship with his convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and other ties between the Clintons and Epstein’s sex trafficking network.
In her opening statement, which she later posted on X, Clinton claimed she had no knowledge of any wrongdoing.
“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.
When committee members pressed her specifically about the Clinton Global Initiative and its connections to Epstein and Maxwell, she repeatedly pointed the finger at husband Bill.
“The number of times that she said, ‘I don’t know, you’ll have to ask my husband,’ was more than a dozen,” said Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-K.Y.
Rep. Scott Perry, R-P.A., was far more aggressive with his criticism.
“One of the things I learned today is if you really have specific questions about the Clinton Global Initiative or the relationship between the Clintons and Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, you’ve got to ask Bill Clinton,” Perry said.
Conservative critics wrote that Clinton sounded “more than willing to throw Bubba under the bus.”
“If you believe that she never encountered Epstein — isn’t she throwing Bill Clinton under the bus?” asked Twitchy.
Only when she was no longer under oath did Hillary defend her husband again.
“I think the chronology of the connection that he had with Epstein ended several years before anything about Epstein’s criminal activities came to light,” she said to reporters after the deposition. “I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of people who had contact with him before his criminal pleas in ’08, they did not know what he was doing.”
Comer said the deposition was “productive” but that the committee “wasn’t satisfied” with what they heard — and pointed to Friday’s session with the former president as the real test.
Bill Clinton will be the first sitting or former president to testify before members of Congress in over 40 years. The last to do so was former President Gerald Ford in 1983, when he testified before a Senate subcommittee about planning for the bicentennial of the Constitution.
Comer said he expected the former president’s deposition to run “even longer” than Thursday’s six-hour session.