The House Oversight Committee released dramatic footage of Hillary and Bill Clinton's depositions last week, revealing a former secretary of state who pounded the table with her fist and nearly walked out, and a former president whose hands shook throughout hours of questioning about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
The videos, each spanning over four hours, were recorded at the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center on February 26 and 27. They are the product of a months-long subpoena battle that the Clintons fought at every turn before finally caving.
What the footage shows is two people who very much did not want to be there. And who can blame them? The questions weren't friendly.
According to the New York Post, the fireworks started when Rep. Lauren Boebert snapped a photo of Hillary Clinton before the hearing kicked off. Clinton erupted, telling the committee:
I am done with this if you guys are doing this, I'm done.
She pounded the table and started to leave. She ultimately returned, but the tone was set. The former secretary of state spent much of her four-and-a-half-hour interview oscillating between fury and theatrical disdain, rolling her eyes and, at times, visibly trying not to laugh.
When asked about her relationship with Epstein, Clinton denied knowing him. But Rep. Nancy Mace needled her repeatedly, referencing an Epstein file email showing that now-Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had invited the disgraced financier to a Clinton campaign fundraiser in 2015. Mace seemingly implied that Clinton wasn't being honest about the extent of her knowledge.
Clinton shouted at Mace. The exchange grew heated enough that Clinton challenged the committee's authority entirely:
You can hold me in contempt from now until the cows come home.
That line landed less like defiance and more like a tell. The Clintons had already fought the subpoena for months. Several Democrats had joined Republicans in advancing a contempt of Congress measure against them. Only then did they agree to sit for testimony. The bravado rings hollow when it follows capitulation.
Boebert asked Clinton about Epstein files that referenced coded language connected to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Clinton's response was sharp and immediate:
Pizzagate was totally made up. It was an outrageous allegation. It ended up hurting a number of people.
She referenced the 2016 shooting at Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C., saying it "caused a deranged young man to show up with an assault rifle and shoot up a local pizzeria."
Whether Pizzagate was nonsense is beside the point. The question was about coded language in Epstein's files. Clinton's pivot to a completely different controversy is the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that should make any observer pay closer attention, not less.
When Mace brought up her own status as a survivor of sexual abuse, Clinton softened noticeably:
I am very sympathetic to your personal situation. I have read about it, I have seen you testify or speak on the floor about it, and I am very much sympathetic with not only what you went through, but appreciate your standing up for survivors.
It was the most human moment of the deposition. It also didn't answer the question.
The 42nd president's deposition the following day carried a different energy. Where Hillary was combative, Bill was careful. Where she raged, he meandered. His hands shook throughout.
Clinton, 79, was asked directly if he ever had any communications with Epstein that related to young women or girls. His answer was a flat "No."
He denied having any knowledge of Epstein's sex crimes before the financier was prosecuted. He acknowledged the relationship but framed it as incidental to charitable work:
My team that was working on the AIDS issue was there, Mr. Epstein was there and Ms. Maxwell.
He said he first remembers encountering Epstein "when I got on an airplane to take a first trip with my foundation in, I think, 2002." He described taking "one flight back from Florida to New York and all or part of several other, I think 4 or 5, trips to Africa, Asia, and one to Northern Europe." He said he communicated with Epstein "usually only on the trips."
He acknowledged Epstein visited the Clinton Foundation's Harlem office at least once and said he himself "paid a brief visit" to Epstein's house.
Then came the photograph. Clinton was confronted with an image showing him in a hot tub with an unidentified woman at a lavish hotel in Brunei. He denied any impropriety, explaining:
The Sultan of Brunei was a man that I had gotten to know well … and he said, 'I want you to stay at this hotel and I hope you'll use the pool,' so I did.
He said he "had forgotten that there was anybody in the hot tub" and could not identify the woman. That's a sentence worth reading twice.
Clinton also read aloud a note he had submitted through Ghislaine Maxwell for inclusion in a 50th birthday book for Epstein. The note praised Epstein's "childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference, and the wealth of friends." After reading it, Clinton remarked, "Not a bad letter."
He then added that he "knew nothing" about Epstein's "criminal behavior with minors" and characterized his impression of the man simply:
I thought Epstein was interesting and curious, so I wrote a letter that I thought reflected that.
A former president of the United States contributed a written tribute to a man now universally recognized as one of the most prolific sex traffickers in modern history. He did so through Epstein's accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, the same woman who attended Chelsea Clinton's 2010 wedding as, in Hillary's telling, "a guest of someone who was invited."
The most revealing moment of Bill Clinton's testimony may have been the simplest. When pressed on details, he offered this:
I have to be honest with you, you know, I'll be 80-years-old if I live to my next birthday – I don't remember everything that happened 24 years ago.
It is the most durable shield in Washington. Selective memory has protected more powerful people than any legal argument ever could. Clinton remembers that Epstein was "interesting and curious." He remembers the Sultan of Brunei's hospitality. He remembers his foundation's AIDS work in granular detail. But the woman in the hot tub? Gone. The specifics of his visits to Epstein's home? Foggy.
To his credit, Clinton did say something that few in his position would:
I do think you should be talking to me. I think you should have called me. I did take those plane trips with him and you have a right to ask those questions.
That candor is notable. It also raises an obvious question: if Clinton believed Congress had every right to ask, why did it take a subpoena, a contempt threat, and months of legal resistance to get him in the chair?
Democrats wasted no time turning the depositions into a weapon aimed elsewhere. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, told reporters during Hillary's deposition:
This committee has now set a new precedent about talking to presidents and former presidents. We're demanding immediately that we ask President Trump to testify in front of our committee and be deposed in front of Oversight Republicans and Democrats.
That framing is entirely predictable. The Clintons sit for depositions about their documented, repeated, personal interactions with a convicted sex trafficker, and the Democratic response is to demand the same treatment for someone else. It's a deflection dressed up as a principle.
President Trump addressed the situation with characteristic directness:
I like Bill Clinton. I don't like seeing him deposed… But they certainly went after me a lot more than that.
Clinton himself testified about a conversation with Trump at a charity golf tournament, in which Trump referenced his own falling out with Epstein over a real estate deal. The Oversight Committee's probe is about the Clintons' ties. Democrats want to make it about everyone else.
Back in August, the Oversight panel subpoenaed the Clintons and eight others for testimony about Epstein. In January, the Clintons sent a letter accusing Committee Chairman James Comer of "trying to punish those whom you see as your enemies." They resisted at every stage. They questioned the committee's authority. They challenged the legitimacy of the process. They invoked privilege. They sent lawyers.
Then, faced with bipartisan contempt, they showed up. Hillary shouted, pounded the table, and nearly left. Bill's hands trembled as he insisted he remembered nothing troubling.
The depositions didn't produce a confession. Nobody expected one. But they produced something arguably more valuable: hours of footage showing two of the most powerful people in American political history forced to answer questions they spent months trying to avoid, about a man whose crimes they insist they knew nothing about, whose plane they rode, whose parties they attended, whose accomplice came to their daughter's wedding, and for whom they wrote birthday tributes praising his curiosity and warmth.
The Clintons wanted this to go away. The cameras made sure it won't.
