It was my first visit to Washington. It was early 1998, at the height of the misnamed “Monica Lewinsky affair” (surely it should have been the “Bill Clinton affair”, without the focus being on the young White House intern), and the DC bureau needed to draft in an extra pair of hands. I was a political correspondent at Westminster at the time, and Tony Blair was due to fly in a few days later.
This was also the height of all that lofty “third way” chat, and the Clintons were putting on a show, with Stevie Wonder and Elton John playing at a glittering banquet at the White House. We were filming arrivals for the shindig when a panicked Downing Street press officer sought me out. The problem was that Blair had to give Elton a lifetime achievement award for some ITV show, and my film crew was the only one around. So we were ushered into a room in the East Wing so the award could be presented. It was riveting. Because as Blair did the honours, at one end of the room stood Hillary doing some stretching exercises, at the other, Bill. Their eyes did not meet, and no conversation took place between them. You felt the temperature in the room drop a couple of degrees as they walked in. Icy doesn’t begin to describe it.
Twenty-eight years later, there is no less fascination with the Clintons’ relationship – and the belief among many Republicans is that all you need to do is wheel them out before Congress, and the American public will be suitably put off.
That surely is the calculation behind the decision to subpoena them both to appear before the House Oversight Committee to discuss the Epstein files.
The Republican controlled committee is not allowing the public or media in, but it is televising the hearing – and will release some of the video at a time of its choosing. It all smells a bit fishy.
Why – when Hillary Clinton has never met Epstein, has never been to his house, has never been to his island – is she seen as such a crucial witness? She’s revealed that at her deposition – under oath – she ended up being asked about UFOs by some of the Republican space cadets. Afterwards, she dismissed the hearing as “partisan political theatre.”
All that said, I am not dismissing the whole thing as a circus. It is completely reasonable that Bill Clinton is called to give evidence. He flew on Epstein’s private jet on more than a dozen occasions, and photos of him with two women in a jacuzzi, or in a swimming pool, require explanation. The former president denies any wrongdoing and is not being accused of any.
In his opening statement, the 42nd president said: “I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong.” He added that he would have turned Epstein in himself if he had known about his crimes. And stressed that his relationship with him ended before he was convicted in 2008.
Where this is uncharted territory is that this is the first time a former president has been subpoenaed to give evidence. And if you’re going to call Bill, then why not the serving president, whose name appears thousands of times in the Epstein files?
Donald Trump, too, denies any wrongdoing. And now whenever he’s asked about it he says he’s been “totally exonerated”.
That would be a reasonable conclusion to draw if all the Epstein files had been released, as was mandated by the legislation passed by congress at the end of last year, and signed into law by Donald Trump.
Sure, millions of documents have been released – and new nuggets are being turned up all the time that beg many questions. Perhaps the most serious has been turned up by National Public Radio (NPR). Their team looked at all the serial numbers on the files and realised that a number were missing.
According to NPR, “these include what appear to be more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor”.
The ranking Democrat member of the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia, confirmed this, saying: “I reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the Department of Justice. Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes.”
Now it may well be that the accusations made by this woman are unfounded, malicious or fantasy. But if you’re going to put one former president on the stand to face questioning, why not another?
While we’re at it, why not Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, who it turns out went to Epstein’s island years after he’d publicly declared that he had broken off relations with the convicted paedophile?
There is still a mystery over how Epstein managed to make his money. A key witness to this is the retail tycoon Les Wexner, the man behind the Victoria’s Secret lingerie chain. The billionaire says Epstein conned him out of several hundred million dollars. Now in his late 80s, he gave evidence from his home in Ohio. He was named as a co-conspirator with Epstein in a 2019 FBI investigation. But none of the Republicans on the committee went to interview him. Only Democrats turned up. Why?
With the honourable and notable exceptions of the Kentucky GOP congressman, Thomas Massie, and the former Georgia congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, it looks to all the world that the Republicans are playing this investigation for political advantage.
This is doomed to fail. There were bad people on all sides and from all professions who wanted to cosy up to Epstein, and have serious questions to answer.
Surely it is the very least that is owed to the victims and survivors of Epstein’s grotesque behaviour.
If you want to kill off the conspiracy theories, call in all the rich and powerful men who may be able to shed light. No exceptions.
And then we can really judge who is properly exonerated.