(AFP) – Bill Clinton has offered an explanation for viral photos released as part of the Jeffrey Epstein files that show the former US president in a hot tub and a pool with a woman whose face is redacted. Clinton and his wife, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, testified last week before a Republican-led congressional panel investigating convicted sex offender Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Clinton told the House Oversight Committee he had no knowledge of the sex crimes of Epstein, who died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking. During the deposition, the 79-year-old former president was asked about a photo that shows him in a hot tub with a woman whose face is covered with a black square and another picture of him in a swimming pool with Maxwell and an unidentified woman.
Clinton said the photos were taken at a hotel during a visit he made to Brunei at the invitation of the Sultan, who was interested in helping with the Clinton Foundation’s AIDS initiative. “He invited me to stay there and he said, ‘I want you to stay at this hotel and I hope you’ll use the pool,'” Clinton said. “I swam around. I sat in the hot tub for five minutes or whatever it was and I got up and went to bed,” he said. “I also believe that there was a Secret Service agent there at the other end of the pool.”
Clinton said he did not know the identity of the unidentified woman in the photos but he believed she was a member of the traveling party. “I don’t know who that is,” he said. Asked if he had “engaged in any sexual activities” with the woman in the photos, Clinton replied: “No.” Hillary Clinton told the congressional panel that she did not know Epstein, and Bill Clinton said he broke ties with him before the financier’s sex crimes came to light in 2008.
Bill Clinton acknowledged during his testimony that he flew on Epstein’s private plane several times in the early 2000s for Clinton Foundation-related humanitarian work. The depositions were held behind closed doors in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons reside, and the committee released videos of their testimony on Monday. Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking minor girls to Epstein.
Both Bill Clinton and President Donald Trump figure prominently in the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice, but neither has been formally accused of any wrongdoing. Clinton told the committee that Trump, a one-time close friend of Epstein, “never said anything to me to make me think he was involved in anything improper with regard to Epstein either.”
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