Former United States President Bill Clinton and his wife, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have agreed to testify as part of the Congressional investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier accused of sex crimes.
This was announced on the evening of February 2 by Clinton's deputy chief of staff, Angel Ureña.
“They negotiated in good faith. You didn't. They told you under oath what they knew, but you don't care. But the former president and the former secretary of state will be there,” Ureña wrote, reposting the Congressional post.
The Clintons had previously refused to testify, facing punishment for doing so. They reversed their decision just days before a vote on whether to hold the couple criminally liable for contempt of court for refusing to appear before the House Oversight Committee.
It is not yet known when the couple will testify. This will be the first time since 1983 that a former US president has testified before a congressional committee.
Last month, the Clintons wrote a letter to the chairman of the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee, James Comer, criticizing his approach to the Epstein investigation.
The letter states: “Your decisions and priorities as chairman of the Epstein investigation committee have hindered progress in establishing the facts about the government's role. There is no plausible explanation for your actions other than partisan politics.”
Bill Clinton was the Democratic President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Hillary Clinton was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016.
Clinton was acquainted with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019, but denies knowing about his sex crimes and claims to have stopped communicating with him twenty years ago.
As reported in the media, logs from Epstein's private jet show that Clinton took it on four international flights in 2002 and 2003.
The former president also appears in photographs taken at the late financier's estate, which were among a batch of documents released by the Justice Department under a law passed by Congress requiring the disclosure of all investigative materials. In one photo, the former president is seen swimming in a pool, and in another, he is lying on his back with his hands behind his head in what appears to be a hot tub.
The US Department of Justice released 3 million new pages related to the Jeffrey Epstein cases on January 30. The Daily Mail, citing intelligence and security sources, reported that Epstein collaborated with Russian intelligence to introduce famous people to girls and thus create compromising information about them.