At the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2015, Donald Trump was road-testing themes for a presidential campaign when his interviewer, Fox News host Sean Hannity, dropped a name into their onstage discussion.
“Bill Clinton,” Hannity prompted the celebrity real estate developer.
“Nice guy,” Trump replied. “Got a lot of problems coming up in my opinion with the famous island with Jeffrey Epstein — a lot of problems.”
So took root a rumor that Trump has since repeated over and over, often to deflect questions about his own association with the convicted sex offender.
Eleven years later, there remains no evidence that Clinton set foot on the notorious island, much less the 28 times that Trump claims. On Friday, the former president will testify under oath before the House Oversight Committee as part of its Epstein investigation.
The panel is questioning his wife, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, on Thursday, although her connections with Epstein and his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell are significantly more tenuous than her husband’s.
Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to two charges of soliciting prostitution, including one involving a minor. He was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019 and died in federal custody later that year. His death was ruled a suicide. Judges and lawmakers say that over decades, he abused, trafficked and molested scores of girls, many of whom have come forward in court and in other public forums.
Bill Clinton took about half a dozen trips on Epstein’s private jet in 2002 and 2003, and he is referred to tens of thousands of times in the trove of Epstein-related documents the Justice Department has released. None include direct correspondence between the two or refute claims by the former president’s aides that he severed ties with Epstein years before his 2019 federal indictment.
Among the files, however, are photos of Clinton with Epstein and — more problematically — of the former president aboard a private plane with his arm around a woman on his lap and in a bubbling pool with another. The women’s faces are redacted, and it is unclear when and where the photos were taken.
No doubt those images will be among the things the committee will ask about on Friday. The lawmakers will also want to know more about a trip Clinton took to Africa in 2002 aboard Epstein’s Boeing 727.
Although the 10-day excursion to seven countries was billed as an opportunity for Clinton to discuss economic development and the fight against HIV/AIDS, the airborne entourage included “about four young women aged 20 to 22 years old,” according to an FBI report dated July 22. One of the women was a masseuse, another a model and a third described herself as a ballerina, according to the report.
None of the emails or FBI accounts implicate Clinton in any wrongdoing or detail any interactions he may or may not have had with women on the plane. He has denied any wrongdoing and that he had any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activities.
The Clintons’ depositions are being taken at a performing arts center in Chappaqua, New York, near their home. They initially resisted complying with the committee’s subpoenas, which they called invalid and legally unenforceable, but capitulated days before the House was expected to hold them in criminal contempt of Congress.
The Clintons asked to be allowed to testify in public. The committee declined, opting instead for a closed-door proceeding.
“Who benefits from this arrangement? It’s not Epstein’s victims, who deserve justice. Not the public, who deserve the truth. It serves only partisan interests. This is not fact-finding, it’s pure politics,” Bill Clinton wrote on X earlier this month.
He added: “I will not sit idly as they use me as a prop in a closed-door kangaroo court by a Republican Party running scared. If they want answers, let’s stop the games & do this the right way: in a public hearing, where the American people can see for themselves what this is really about.”
As Hillary Clinton’s deposition was set to begin Thursday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky) told reporters: “No one is accusing, at this moment, the Clintons of any wrongdoing.”
“They’re going to have due process, but we have a lot of questions, and the purpose of the whole investigation is to try to understand many things about Epstein,” Comer added. “How did he accumulate so much wealth? How was he able to surround himself with some of the most powerful men in the world? Was he an asset for our government or any other government? These are the questions that we’re going to ask over the next two days, and hopefully we’ll be able to get some answers.”
For the Clintons, this has a familiar feel. In more than three decades on the national stage, the couple have been at the center of countless — often outlandish — conspiracy theories and accusations. Yet they have usually come out on top politically.
When the Republican House was moving to impeach Clinton in 1998 for lying under oath about his affair with a White House intern and obstructing justice, the GOP lost five seats in that year’s midterm elections.
Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) — not Clinton — was unseated as a result. Gingrich later told The Washington Post that his own daughters had implored him: “Don’t pick a fight. This economy is really good.” Clinton’s approval rating, meanwhile, hit an all-time high of 73 percent in the Gallup poll the week he was impeached.
“He and his wife have the capacity to drive people into the most self-destructive behaviors,” former Clinton aide Paul Begala said in an interview. “What does Congressman Comer think he’s gonna get here? He’s the dog who caught the car, right? And it never works out for the dog.”
It would seem that no conspiracy theory about the Clintons is too far-fetched for Trump to seize upon. In 2019, after Epstein was found hanging in his federal prison cell in what Trump’s own administration deemed a suicide, Trump spread social media posts, with the hashtag #ClintonBodyCount, suggesting that the Clintons had him murdered. In 2025, Trump and his “official war room account” dredged up a 2016 videothat falsely claimed that the couple were responsible for other deaths.
As Trump’s own long association with Epstein has come under scrutiny, the president has directed Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department to investigate Epstein’s ties to prominent Democrats, including Clinton. Trump has said that he and Epstein had a falling out in the mid-2000s. Trump has maintained that he did not know about Epstein’s criminal behavior.
It is not surprising that the files regarding Bill Clinton do not include the kind of incriminating emails that have brought down other prominent people who associated with Epstein, both in the United States and abroad.
The former president doesn’t use email, and has sent only a handful ever, all of which were when he was president, an associate said. Only in recent years has Clinton begun to text, mostly with family. Nor, the associate added, did Epstein have Clinton’s personal phone number.
Although Bill Clinton is frequently mentioned in the batches of files, none appears to include direct communications with either of the Clintons. Many of the emails involve Epstein sharing articles about the Clintons or their foundation with other associates and exchanges about previous social interactions with them. In one email, written in 2016, Epstein told author Michael Wolff that Bill Clinton had never visited his island.
There are also FBI reports about a 2002 trip to Africa that Bill Clinton took on Epstein’s plane, and communications between Clinton aide Doug Band and Maxwell. The numerous emails between Band and Maxwell during 2004 and 2005 were flirtatious and at times sexually suggestive.
Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison for trafficking young sexual abuse victims to Epstein, was also at the 2010 wedding of the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea. In an interview last year with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, she said she was invited as the date of her then-boyfriend Ted Waitt, a tech billionaire who was a major donor to the Clinton Foundation.
“President Clinton was my friend, not Epstein’s friend,” Maxwell said. She took credit for having been “very central” to the establishment of the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual philanthropic gathering sponsored by the Clinton Foundation that began in 2005. Maxwell remained in the Clintons’ circle for years afterward, she said, and indicated that she last saw the former president at a dinner sometime between 2016 and 2018.
The Clinton Foundation has said it received only one donation, for $25,000, from an Epstein-affiliated foundation, in 2006. It is not clear how deeply the Oversight Committee plans to look into this issue, or whether it has any evidence to back Maxwell’s broader claims.
When Maxwell was called before the Oversight Committee earlier this month, she declined to answer lawmakers’ questions and invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. But her attorney David Oscar Markus said she was “prepared to speak fully and honestly” if first granted clemency by Trump.
Both Trump and Clinton “are innocent of any wrongdoing,” he added. “Ms. Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to that explanation.”
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