Bill Clinton has received unlikely sympathy from President Donald Trump after being hauled in by Republicans to face a grilling over his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaking at the White House as he headed to Texas on Friday, Trump told reporters that he didn’t like seeing the former president being required to testify as part of a House Oversight Committee probe into the Epstein files.
“I don’t like seeing him deposed,” Trump said. “But they certainly went after me a lot more than that.”
Republicans on the committee did not actually “go after” Trump at all, and have so far refused to investigate his ties to the late sex trafficker.
On Friday, however, they brought in Clinton to explain what he knew about Epstein after the Democrat appeared multiple times in the Epstein files with both the disgraced financier, his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and unidentified women.
In his opening statement, Clinton insisted once again that he did nothing wrong and had “no idea” about the crimes Epstein was committing. Nor did he see anything that “ever gave me pause”, he added.
“As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing—I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals,” the former president said in his statement, which he posted on X.
Clinton’s comments come after documents revealed he traveled on Epstein’s plane 16 times—a private jet dubbed the Lolita Express, which was known to take victims to Epstein’s island.
He also appeared in a number of photos, including one of Clinton in a pool with Maxwell and at an event with Rolling Stone frontman Mick Jagger and a woman whose face was redacted.
On Thursday, former first lady Hillary Clinton faced seven hours of questions, where she repeated she had no ties to Epstein or his conduct, and blasted GOP lawmakers for fixating on her instead of questioning Trump.
Speaking on Friday, Trump told reporters: “I don’t know anything about the Epstein files, I’ve been fully exonerated.”
He also backed his embattled Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who could soon be brought in to testify after Republicans joined Democrats to support such a move.
This came after a new photo, which was found in a cache of Epstein files but was later removed by Trump’s Justice Department, appeared to show Epstein and Lutnick walking on Little St. James, the Caribbean island where many of Epstein’s heinous crimes took place.
“He’s a very innocent guy. He’s doing a great job,” Trump said when asked about a potential subpoena for Lutnick to appear before the committee investigating Epstein.
Trump has never been charged with wrongdoing regarding Epstein, a former friend he used to party with in New York and Florida.
However, the president’s name appears in the Epstein files more than a million times, according to a top Democrat, Jamie Raskin, who reviewed the Justice Department’s unredacted version of the documents.
The president’s sympathy for Clinton was not the first time he has shown the Democrat support over the files.
In December, one month after ordering a Justice Department investigation into Clinton’s links to Epstein, Trump said “a lot of people are very angry” that material was being released about people who met Epstein innocently.
“I don’t like the pictures of Bill Clinton being shown,” he added. “I don’t like the pictures of other people being shown. I think it’s a terrible thing.”
