President Donald Trump said Friday that he was against making former President Bill Clinton sit for a deposition about Jeffrey Epstein while adding “they certainly went after me a lot more.”
Trump addressed reporters at the White House before a trip to Texas on Friday, according to Mediaite, criticizing Congress for deposing Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, about sex criminal and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Trump again claimed that he had been “fully exonerated” and didn’t know “anything about the Epstein files.”
“I don’t like seeing him deposed, but they certainly went after me a lot more than that,” Trump said about Bill Clinton. “I like him and I don’t like seeing him deposed.”
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Though the depositions are closed-door, Clinton released the text of his opening statement to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on X.
In the statement, Clinton says that he “had no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing.”
“No matter how many photos you show me, I have two things that at the end of the day matter more than your interpretation of those 20-year-old photos. I know what I saw, and more importantly what I didn’t see. I know what I did, and more importantly, what I didn’t do. I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong.”
Clinton admits to flying on Epstein’s plane, nicknamed “The Lolita Express,” but says he cut contact with Epstein sometime before 2009. Epstein was first convicted in 2008 of procuring a minor for prostitution.
Clinton has previously said he never visited Epstein’s private island, Little St. James, according to a public statement released by Angel Ureña, his deputy chief of staff, in 2019.
However, Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre said in 2011 she had seen Clinton on the island sometime between 1999-2001.
“I’d have been about 17 at the time. I flew to the Caribbean with Jeffrey and then Ghislaine Maxwell went to pick up Bill in a huge black helicopter that Jeffrey had bought her,” she told the Daily Mail at the time.
In an interview for the 2020 Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, Giuffre said “I never saw [Clinton] do anything improper.” But in her 2011 Daily Mail interview, she denies Clinton’s claim that he knew nothing of what was going on.
“Bill must have known about Jeffrey’s girls. There were three desks in the living area of the villa on the island. They were covered with pictures of Jeffrey shaking hands with famous people and photos of naked girls, including one of me that Jeffrey had at all his houses, lying in a hammock,” she said.
In an interview with her lawyer Jack Scarola in 2011—submitted as evidence in her 2015 lawsuit against Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell and unsealed in 2019—Giuffre alleged that during Clinton’s visit to Little St. James, that in addition to Maxwell, Epstein, Giuffre and Clinton on the island, there were also “two young girls,” but no mention is made of any wrongdoing.
Guiffre died by suicide in 2025.
Two other witnesses say Clinton visited the island. Doug Band, Clinton’s former chief of staff, says Clinton visited the island in January 2003, according to a 2020 interview in Vanity Fair. However a Clinton spokesperson provided “detailed travelogue entries” of the time which did not back up Band’s statement. Band and Clinton had a falling out and had officially cut ties in 2015, according to the New York Post. Both Clintons have since criticized Band.
“No staffer has ever used their role to serve their interests as much as Doug Band,” a Clinton family spokesperson told Vanity Fair. “For many years he was a valuable member of President Clinton’s team and supportive of Clinton Foundation programs. Until he wasn’t. He put the foundation at risk by leveraging a world-class philanthropy for his own financial gain. It’s as disappointing a story as it is a sad one and ultimately why Doug Band and the Clintons parted ways.”
Steve Scully, who provided IT services to Epstein on Little St. James from 1999 to 2005, said in the Netflix documentary he saw Clinton there once during his employment.
“I saw Bill Clinton sitting with Jeffrey on the living-room porch area, which was Jeffrey’s favorite spot,” Scully said, according to New York magazine. “I saw no other guests there at that time at all. I just thought, ‘Hey, wow, Jeffrey’s sitting with Bill Clinton.’”
Ureña denies Scully’s account, telling New York, “This was a lie the first time it was told, and it isn’t true today, no matter how many times it’s repeated.”
Image via Reuters