Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday criticized questions she said she got from House Republicans about UFOs and the “Pizzagate” conspiracy during her deposition as part of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“It then got, at the end, quite unusual because I started being asked about UFOs and a series of questions about Pizzagate — one of the most vile bogus conspiracy theories that was propagated on the internet — that was serving as the basis of a member’s questions to me,” Clinton told reporters after her deposition in Chappaqua, N.Y.
She added, however, “I want to commend Chairman [James] Comer [R-Ky.] for raising a series of significant questions that I responded to about the nature of the investigation and the areas that I thought should be explored. So I appreciated that, I want to see the truth come out. So that was a reassuring way to end a very long, repetitive deposition.”
Clinton said she answered “every one” of the committee’s questions as fully as she could based on what she knew.
“I thought it was very repetitive,” Clinton later said. “I thought that they literally asked the same questions over and over again, which didn’t seem to me to be very productive. And then, as I said toward the end, there were several questions that were off-subject.”
She said she never met with Epstein and that she knew his associate Ghislaine Maxwell “casually, as an aquaintance.”
She later said she was confident that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) files related to Epstein do not reveal anything that suggests her husband, former President Clinton, knew about Epstein’s crimes.
Clinton said she will not testify again and slammed the committee for not allowing the hearing to be in public, as she and Bill Clinton had pushed for, saying they could have “spent their day more productively.”
Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) hinted at the questions Clinton was asked during an appearance on CNN. Anchor Jake Tapper asked if it was true that the questions about UFOs and “Pizzagate” were asked during the deposition.
“I hope that the transcript will be released within 24 hours,” Subramanyam told Tapper. “I‘m not allowed to say specifics about it, but I will just say that the transcript will be very revealing about that.”
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) praised the hearing and wrote on the social platform X that Clinton “gave us plenty to work with today.”
“So generous, in fact, that she gave us plenty of ammunition heading into tomorrow’s deposition with her husband,” Mace wrote. “I got three rounds with her today, and I’m just getting warmed up.”
The Clintons agreed to sit for depositions under threat of being held in contempt of Congress for defying a congressional subpoena. The former president, who flew on Epstein’s plane a few times during the early 2000s and who appears in photos released as part of the Epstein files, is scheduled to sit for a deposition Friday.
Controversy boiled over earlier in the deposition Thursday after Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) leaked a photo from inside the room, which was against the rules set out for the interview. Oversight Democrats called it “unnacceptable” that Republicans broke “their own committee rules that they established with the Secretary and her team,” ranking member Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) said.
When later asked about the photo, Boebert made a reference to the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while serving in the Obama administration. The issue became a key controversy during the final stretch of her 2016 presidential campaign.
“I just returned to my hotel room and installed the BleachBit software … So, I guess in regards to taking photos, I do not recall,” Boebert quipped to reporters.
