How well did Bill Clinton know Jeffrey Epstein?
Former President Bill Clinton's history of traveling with Jeffrey Epstein in the years shortly after the two-term Democrat left the White House in 2001 has long fueled questions and speculation about the nature of their relationship.
President Trump's call last week for the Justice Department and the FBI to "investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton" and other high-profile Democrats, posted on Trump's social media platform, has again bumped that relationship into the headlines.
This comes as the House of Representatives voted 427-1 on a bill to compel the Justice Department to publicly release its files on Epstein.
The bill is now headed to the Senate, which agreed on Tuesday to unanimously approve it, sending it on to President Donald Trump's desk, who said Monday that he would sign it.
No Epstein survivor or associate has ever made a public allegation of wrongdoing or inappropriate behavior by Clinton in connection with his prior relationship with Epstein. But as far back as 2015, Trump has insinuated that Clinton's travels with Epstein might involve some compromising behavior.
The House Oversight Committee last week released thousands of documents from Epstein's estate, including emails from and to the late multi-millionaire financier, who died by suicide in 2019 while in federal custody after being indicted for alleged sexual trafficking of minors.
“These emails prove Bill Clinton did nothing and knew nothing. The rest is noise meant to distract from election losses, backfiring shutdowns, and who knows what else," a spokesperson for the Clinton Foundation said in a statement to ABC News.
Flight logs from Epstein's private jets made public during civil litigation against Epstein showed that Clinton and his entourage had taken four international sojourns in 2002 and 2003 on the financier's Boeing 727 to locations including Bangkok, Brunei, Rwanda, Russia, China and elsewhere.
Ghislaine Maxwell, the Epstein associate who's currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for recruiting and grooming the underage girls whom Epstein sexually abused, was listed as a passenger on each of those trips, identified in the flight logs by the initials "GM."
The total number of flight “legs” that included Clinton is 26, according to the logs, though many of those legs were parts of the same international trips. Clinton's last known trip on Epstein's plane was in November 2003, according to the logs.
The first reports that Epstein was under investigation in Florida for alleged sexual exploitation of minors surfaced in 2005.
At a conservative political conference in 2015, before he formally announced his first bid for president, Donald Trump told the audience that Clinton is a "nice guy," but has "a lot of problems coming up, in my opinion, with the famous island” – a reference to Little St. James, Epstein’s private estate in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein entertained his wealthy and famous friends both before and after he was jailed in Florida in 2008 after pleading guilty to charges of solicitation of prostitution with a minor.
President Trump has since often repeated the unsubstantiated claim that Clinton went to Epstein's island more than twenty times, while pointing out that he had never been there himself.
"I never went to the island," Trump told reporters at the White House earlier this year, as his administration continued to deal with the fallout of its decision not to release the Epstein investigative files to the public.
"I never had the privilege of going to his island, and I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down, I didn't want to go to his island," Trump said. It was the first time the president claimed he had received and declined an invitation to the island.
None of the flight records from Epstein’s planes that have surfaced in litigation indicate that Clinton or Trump were ever aboard for a trip to Epstein’s island.
However, in 2011, Virginia Roberts Giuffre reportedly told the U.K.’s Mail on Sunday newspaper that she had met Bill Clinton on two occasions, including once on Epstein’s island. She claimed that she dined on the island with Epstein, Clinton, Maxwell, and “two young brunettes,” the paper reported.
Giuffre stressed, according to the newspaper’s report, that she was not “lent out” to Clinton and that she did not witness any interaction between Clinton and the other women she claimed were there.
The Mail’s report also contained a quote attributed to Giuffre in which she claimed that Ghislaine Maxwell “went to pick up Bill in a huge black helicopter that Jeffrey had bought her.”
Giuffre reportedly told the Mail that she queried Epstein about the nature of his relationship with Clinton, and that Epstein told her that Clinton “owes me some favors.”
Years later, when Giuffre was deposed by attorneys for Maxwell, Giuffre claimed that the Mail reporter had inaccurately quoted her about the helicopter.
“That wasn’t an eyewitness statement,” Giuffre said in the November 2016 deposition. “I didn’t see her do it. Ghislaine was the one who told me about that; that’s she’s the one who flew Bill.”
Maxwell said in a 2016 deposition that the claim about the helicopter was “another one of Virginia’s lies.” Maxwell was a licensed helicopter pilot but said in the deposition that she had “never flown President Clinton at any time ever, in any helicopter, in any place, any time, in any state, in any country, at any time, anywhere.”
Giuffre, however, maintained that she had met Clinton on the island, according to records of her defamation case against Maxwell, which was settled in 2017. In the spring of 2016, while Hillary Clinton was running for president against Donald Trump, Giuffre’s lawyers sought court approval to depose Bill Clinton, but the judge presiding over the litigation did not allow it.
Maxwell and Epstein both long asserted that Clinton never visited Little St. James.
Maxwell, in a recorded interview earlier this year with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, said that it was she, not Epstein, who had a friendship with Clinton, and that she was the one who suggested and organized Clinton’s trips on Epstein’s aircraft.
"President Clinton was my friend, not Epstein's friend," Maxwell told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. "President Clinton liked me, and we got along terribly well. But I never saw that warmth with Mr. Epstein."
Maxwell also told Blanche that she was certain the former president had never been to the island.
"He never, absolutely never went. And I can be sure of that because there's no way he would have gone. I don't believe there's any way that he would've gone to the island had I not been there. Because I don't believe he had an independent friendship, if you will, with Epstein," Maxwell told Blanche.
Epstein also claimed that Giuffre had lied about meeting Clinton on the island, according to the court records and messages released last week by the House Oversight Committee.
In one 2011 exchange that Epstein wrote to “The Duke” – believed to be the former Prince Andrew – he denied claims that Giuffre had made about meeting men, including Clinton and his former vice president, Al Gore.
“These stories are complete ant utter fantasy,, I dont know and have never met Al gore, CLinton was never on the island,” Epstein wrote in his typo-riddled style.
In another exchange in 2015, Epstein wrote to a reporter to deny what appear from the message to be allegations from Virginia Giuffre.
“[REDACTED] the story teller , crafted much of it out of whole cloth. . part of her story , is that she was at multiple orgies with Clinton and speciifically, the minute details of a dinner had on the island with him,” Epstein wrote, continuing in part: “Clinton was NEVER EVER there, never.”
The GOP-led House Oversight Committee – which is conducting a broad investigation into the government’s handling of criminal probes of Epstein – has already indicated its interest in questioning former President Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The committee initially issued subpoenas on Aug. 5 for the Clintons to appear for depositions in October as part of their investigation.
"Given your past relationships with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, the Committee believes that you have information regarding their activities that is relevant to the Committee’s investigation," Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., wrote in a letter to Bill Clinton.
"Given your past service as Secretary of State, the Committee believes that you may have knowledge of efforts by the federal government to combat international sex trafficking operations of the type run by Mr. Epstein," Comer wrote to Hillary Clinton.
Neither of those depositions has yet occurred. Republicans on the committee are in communication with the Clintons’ attorneys regarding scheduling a deposition, a source familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Clinton's association with Epstein was first noted publicly in 2002, after reporters learned of the former president's journey that year on Epstein's jet for a humanitarian mission to multiple African nations. Clinton told New York Magazine through a spokesperson at the time that "Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science."
"I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS," the statement further said.
In that same article, written by Landon Thomas Jr., whose name appeared frequently in Epstein messages released last week by the House, Trump boasted of his friendship with Epstein, saying, "I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy."
"He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life," Trump told the magazine.
Clinton and his aides had done little to address questions about the ex-president's relationship with Epstein until after Epstein's arrest on federal sex trafficking charges in July 2019. A spokesperson issued a statement two days later, saying that Clinton "knows nothing" of Epstein's crimes and had never visited Little St. James.
The statement further said Clinton hadn't spoken to Epstein in "well over a decade" and that all of the former president's trips on Epstein's plane "included stops in connection with the work of The Clinton Foundation." Clinton's representatives said that the former president cut off contact with Epstein in 2005, before the financier came under investigation in Palm Beach, Florida, for allegedly luring underage girls to his seaside mansion for illicit, sexualized massages.
Subsequent reporting after Epstein's death has revealed that Epstein and Maxwell attended a 1993 reception for donors to the non-profit White House Historical Association. The smiling pair is seen greeting President Clinton at the White House in photos unearthed from the archives of the Clinton Presidential Library in Arkansas.
When Epstein first faced potential federal prosecution in 2007, one of the disgraced financier's lawyers wrote to prosecutors to tout Epstein's pedigree as "part of the original group that conceived of the Clinton Global Initiative," according to a 2007 letter attached to a court filing several years later.
Maxwell was convicted in 2021 on five of six counts related to the abuse and trafficking of underage girls. After the verdict, Maxwell's attorneys cited her connection to former President Clinton's charitable work as part of her effort for a reduced sentence, including a claim of "helping develop the Clinton Global Initiative," according to a sentencing memo filed with the court.
According to federal election records, Bill Clinton's presidential campaign also received $1,000 from Epstein in 1992. Seven years later, Epstein contributed $20,000 to a joint fundraising committee with the Democratic Party and then-Senate hopeful, Hillary Clinton.
