Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accuses the Trump administration of carrying out a “cover-up” in its handling of the Epstein files, while the president claims the files “totally exonerated” him and “pulled in” the Clintons.
“Get the files out,” Clinton told the BBC on Monday from Berlin, where she attended the World Forum. “They are slow-walking it.”
Clinton’s husband former President Bill Clinton is mentioned and pictured numerous times in the Epstein files. Both Clintons have denied any contemporaneous knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, and survivors and authorities have not accused them of wrongdoing.
Over the weekend, Clinton echoed her calls for transparency while speaking at the Munich Security Conference.
She called the content of the Epstein files “horrifying” and demanded their full release.
“It is something that needs to be totally transparent,” she said on a panel.
“I’ve called for many, many years for everything to be put out there so people can not only see what’s in them but also, if appropriate, hold people accountable,” she added. “We’ll see what happens.”
Clinton’s comments piqued Trump, who claimed the Epstein files were partisan and had in fact “exonerated” him.
“I have nothing to hide,” the president told reporters on Monday. “I’ve been exonerated. I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. They went in hoping that they’d find it and they found just the opposite. I’ve been totally exonerated.”
Of the Clintons, Trump said the files had “pulled them in” and that Clinton’s recent comments in Germany were a sign of “Trump derangement syndrome.”
“They’ve been pulled in and many other Democrats have been pulled in,” he claimed.
Both Clintons are due to testify before Congress later this month, after initially signaling they would resist what they called “invalid and legally unenforceable” subpoenas in the Republican-led Epstein probe in the House.
“We will show up but we think it would be better to have it in public,” Clinton said in her BBC interview, arguing that she and her husband were being used as a “shiny object” to deflect blame from the Trump administration.
The Justice Department said in a letter to lawmakers over the weekend it had released all pertinent records that it could in order to comply with last year’s bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act, which President Trump signed after months of warring with members of his own party who backed the bill.
Legislators insist the Trump administration continues to fail to meet its obligations under the bill.
“Your government is withholding information,” Rep. Nancy Mace, one of the backers of the law, wrote on X on Saturday.
The Trump administration has released about two percent of the data investigators have described as being in their possession on Epstein, according to analysis and internal emails obtained by U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 News.
In addition to this reported deficit of releases, lawmakers have also accused the DOJ of “muddying the waters” by disclosing scores of high-profile figures whose names appear in the files only tangentially, such as people mentioned in news articles shared by the late sex criminal.
“To have Janis Joplin, who died when Epstein was 17, in the same list as Larry Nassar, who went to prison for the sexual abuse of hundreds of young women and child pornography, with no clarification of how either was mentioned in the files is absurd,” Rep. Ro Khanna, one of the lawmakers leading the Epstein disclosure effort, said on X.
