Bill Clinton to face questions over Epstein ties
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Former US president Bill Clinton will face questions from a Congressional panel on Friday on his well-documented links to Jeffrey Epstein, as Democrats seek to shift focus onto Donald Trump’s own ties to the convicted sex offender.
Clinton features prominently throughout the latest Epstein files disclosures, with the former president insisting that he broke ties with him well before the disgraced billionaire’s 2008 conviction for sex offenses.
Being mentioned in the files released by the US Department of Justice does not imply wrongdoing, and Clinton has not been accused of a crime or formally investigated, AFP reports.
He follows his wife, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who testified on Thursday, calling for Donald Trump – who like Bill Clinton had ties with Epstein – to appear before the panel.
“If this committee is serious about learning the truth about Epstein’s trafficking crimes… it would ask [Trump] directly under oath about the tens of thousands of times he shows up in the Epstein files,” she said in an opening statement published online.
The depositions are being held behind closed doors even though the Clintons called for them to be open and televised, a move Bill Clinton denounced as akin to a “kangaroo court.”
In other developments:
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Zohran Mamdani, New York’s mayor, met again with Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss federal funding for a housing project, and persuaded the president to release a Columbia University student detained by ICE agents.
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Hillary Clinton said that, after she repeatedly told House Republicans she did not know Jeffrey Epstein, their questions got “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”.
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The Federal Aviation Administration closed the airspace in an area around Fort Hancock, Texas after congressional Democrats said a military laser-based anti-drone system accidentally shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone.
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Democratic leaders in the US Senate said they will also force a vote “in the coming days” on a war powers resolution to make sure any US participation in military action against Iran requires congressional authorization.
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Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, called on the justice department to explain why a photograph that appears to show Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, with Jeffrey Epstein, was removed from the public database of Epstein files.
Key events
James Comer, the chair of the House oversight committee, said on Fox News that Hillary Clinton deferred answers to her husband, former president Bill Clinton, nearly a dozen times during her deposition on Thursday.
“Today, former President Bill Clinton is sitting down with the House Oversight Committee and answering questions under oath,” Comer wrote on X.
Comer suggested Thursday that Bill Clinton’s deposition would be “even longer” than Hillary Clinton’s, as Bill Clinton has more documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
“She kept saying, not only did she not have a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, that he was a huckster and, you know, he was a con artist and all of that,” Comer told Fox. “Well, she said many times under oath that she had never met Jeffrey Epstein. But the reason she was asked so many times is we kept presenting new items of evidence.”
Hillary Clinton was questioned on Epstein ties to the Clinton Global Initiative, but said she was in elected office at the time Republicans were asking about, Comer said. But Bill Clinton will likely be asked about these ties to the Clinton network as well.
A little recap of Hillary Clinton’s deposition from the committee yesterday: she repeatedly said she had never met Jeffrey Epstein to her knowledge, and she knew Ghislaine Maxwell casually, but she had no knowledge of their crimes.
“I don’t know how many times I had to say, I don’t know Jeffrey Epstein,” she said in a press conference at the end of the day.
Republicans on the committee asked her about UFOs and the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, a sign of their lack of seriousness with the proceedings, she said.
She also called for the committee to bring Donald Trump in for a deposition, and Democrats on the committee reiterated that demand. Democrats on the committee also demanded that the video and transcript of the hearing with Hillary Clinton be released within 24 hours of its conclusion.
The hearing paused yesterday for a time after Republican representative Lauren Boebert reportedly sent a photo from inside the closed-door meeting to a conservative reporter. The Clintons wanted the hearings to be open to the public and press, which they again requested after the breach, but were unsuccessful.
41% of Americans sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis, poll finds
A higher percentage of Americans now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis in the Middle East, a new Gallup poll released today shows.
According to the poll, 41% of Americans say they sympathize more with Palestinans, compared to 36% who sympathize more with Isrealis.
“The five-percentage-point difference is not statistically significant, but it contrasts with a clear lead for the Israelis only a year ago (46% vs. 33%) and larger leads over the prior 24 years,” Gallup notes in its writeup of the poll results.
Until last year, Israelis consistently polled double-digits ahead with Americans on their Middle East sympathies, but that gap began to narrow in 2019.
The poll also showed a new high for Americans who view the Palestinian territories favorably, at 37%, which trails Israel, at 46%. The percent of Americans who favor an independent Palestinian state nearly matched Gallup’s highest measurement on the topic from 2003, with 57% of Americans in favor.
George Chidi
After the FBI seized elections materials from Fulton county last month, Donald Trump returned once again to his false claim that he beat Joe Biden in Georgia in the 2020 election.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said to Dan Bongino on the former FBI staffer’s podcast earlier this month . “We should take over the voting in at least – many – 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Later that week, it was revealed that the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who was present at the Fulton county raid, led an investigation into Puerto Rico’s voting machines – taking some machines to examine – last May to identify what her office said were potential vulnerabilities in the island’s electronic voting systems. Taken together, Trump’s comments and actions are pointing toward a possibility Democratic voters have until now only contemplated: the federal government seizing voting machines across the country in a way that disrupts voting in the 2026 midterms.
If the federal government declared some digital voting machines off-limits at the last minute, it would set off a chain of emergency court hearings, leaving elections directors scrambling to find another way to print and count ballots before those cases resolved. Early voting could crater. Election Day voting could be curtailed. And results might not be ready for weeks.
Historically, midterm elections tend to go against the party of a newly-elected president, as Trump has acknowledged, and the president’s efforts to thwart that eventuality are clear across the administration. Last year, he directed Republican-controlled states to gerrymander congressional districts to try to limit opportunities for Democrats to win seats.
The civil rights division of the department of justice has backed challenges to voting rights laws, which advocates say are an attempt to hold on to other seats. A disruption of election apparatuses could be seen as one more mechanism for authoritarian control of the government.
President Donald Trump says the US economy is booming and that he has fixed inflation. But most Americans, including many in his Republican Party, do not see things that way, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
“This is the golden age of America,” Trump said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. “The roaring economy is roaring like never before.“
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, completed on Monday, showed 68% of people disagree with a statement that “the US economy is booming,” a claim Trump has repeatedly made since returning to office in January 2025.
Republicans in the survey were sharply divided on how well the economy is doing, a warning sign for the party ahead of the 3 November midterm elections when Trump’s party will defend majorities in the US House of Representatives and Senate.
Some 56% of Republicans thought the economy was booming, while 43% disagreed.
The United States authorised the departure of non-emergency embassy staff from Israel on Friday, as it threatened strikes on Iran and pressed its biggest military build-up in the Middle East in decades.
The move came a day after a round of Oman-mediated talks between Iran and the US seen as a last-ditch bid to avert war, though initial optimism was tempered by Tehran warning Washington must drop “excessive demands” to reach a deal.
The talks follow repeated threats from president Donald Trump to strike Iran while the US military builds up its forces in the region, AFP reported.
As the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, was due to arrive off the coast of key US-ally Israel, the US embassy in the country announced it was allowing non-emergency government personnel and family members to leave “due to safety risks”.
“Persons may wish to consider leaving Israel while commercial flights are available,” the embassy said on its website.
The New York Times reported that US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee sent an email to embassy staff on Friday morning saying that those wishing to leave “should do so TODAY”.
Jacqueline Sweet
Three memos that describe four interviews conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2019 contain explicit but unsubstantiated claims that Donald Trump sexually abused a woman when she was a minor in the early 1980s with the assistance of Jeffrey Epstein, according to a Guardian review of those documents.
The Department of Justice did not release those records when it uploaded millions of pages of files related to Epstein beginning in December. The existence of the missing documents was first reported by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and subsequently confirmed by NPR, causing outrage in Washington and sparking an investigation from congressional Democrats.
The Guardian obtained the missing FBI form 302 reports, which memorialize 25 pages of agents’ notes from the four interviews conducted in the summer and fall of 2019. The notes describe how the woman came forward to tell agents she recognized Epstein from a photo sent by a childhood friend. Only the first session, in which she did not name Trump, made it into the public release. The Guardian has chosen not to publish the woman’s name.
Her allegations have not been verified, and the FBI never brought charges related to her claims, which at times appear outlandish. Her statements also contradict what is known about Epstein’s life in the early 1980s. The millions of investigative documents released by the DoJ have contained explosive allegations that have led to resignations and arrests, but also specious claims that have later proven false. Trump has consistently denied wrongdoing related to Epstein, and said last week: “I did nothing.”
Bill Clinton to face questions over Epstein ties
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Former US president Bill Clinton will face questions from a Congressional panel on Friday on his well-documented links to Jeffrey Epstein, as Democrats seek to shift focus onto Donald Trump’s own ties to the convicted sex offender.
Clinton features prominently throughout the latest Epstein files disclosures, with the former president insisting that he broke ties with him well before the disgraced billionaire’s 2008 conviction for sex offenses.
Being mentioned in the files released by the US Department of Justice does not imply wrongdoing, and Clinton has not been accused of a crime or formally investigated, AFP reports.
He follows his wife, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who testified on Thursday, calling for Donald Trump – who like Bill Clinton had ties with Epstein – to appear before the panel.
“If this committee is serious about learning the truth about Epstein’s trafficking crimes… it would ask [Trump] directly under oath about the tens of thousands of times he shows up in the Epstein files,” she said in an opening statement published online.
The depositions are being held behind closed doors even though the Clintons called for them to be open and televised, a move Bill Clinton denounced as akin to a “kangaroo court.”
In other developments:
-
Zohran Mamdani, New York’s mayor, met again with Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss federal funding for a housing project, and persuaded the president to release a Columbia University student detained by ICE agents.
-
Hillary Clinton said that, after she repeatedly told House Republicans she did not know Jeffrey Epstein, their questions got “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”.
-
The Federal Aviation Administration closed the airspace in an area around Fort Hancock, Texas after congressional Democrats said a military laser-based anti-drone system accidentally shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone.
-
Democratic leaders in the US Senate said they will also force a vote “in the coming days” on a war powers resolution to make sure any US participation in military action against Iran requires congressional authorization.
-
Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, called on the justice department to explain why a photograph that appears to show Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, with Jeffrey Epstein, was removed from the public database of Epstein files.
