Hillary Clinton said Republican lawmakers questioned her about "UFOs" and the debunked "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory during a roughly seven-hour closed-door deposition before the House Oversight Committee, an exchange she described as "quite unusual" and emblematic of what she called partisan "fishing expeditions."
Speaking to reporters outside the Chappaqua Performing Arts Centre in New York after her testimony, the former Secretary of State said the session veered from questions about Jeffrey Epstein into topics she characterized as unrelated to the committee's stated mandate.
"It then got, at the end, quite unusual because I started being asked about UFOs and a series of questions about Pizzagate," Clinton said. She declined to identify which lawmaker posed the questions.
Clinton called Pizzagate "one of the most vile, bogus conspiracy theories that was propagated on the internet," referencing the false claim circulated during the 2016 presidential election that Democratic officials were running a child sex trafficking ring from a Washington pizza restaurant.
The theory had real-world consequences. In December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch traveled from North Carolina to Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C., armed with an AR-15-style rifle. He fired into a locked door while searching for children he believed were hidden in the building. No one was injured, according to CBS News. Welch later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in prison.
The deposition forms part of the House Oversight Committee's investigation into the federal handling of the Epstein case, including his 2008 plea agreement and his 2019 death in federal custody. Chairman James Comer said that "some of the comments" Clinton made at the end about Epstein would be "interesting," though he did not elaborate.
For much of the questioning, Clinton said she reiterated that she had no connection to Epstein. "I don't know how many times I had to say I did not know Jeffrey Epstein," she told reporters. "I never went to his island. I never went to his homes. I never went to his offices."
In an opening statement she later posted on X, Clinton accused the committee of attempting to deflect scrutiny from President Donald Trump. "What is being held back? Who is being protected? And why the cover-up?" she wrote, adding that Republicans should question Trump "directly under oath about the tens of thousands of times he shows up in the Epstein files."
Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the committee, echoed that call. "We're demanding immediately that we ask President Trump to testify in front of our committee and be deposed in front of Oversight Republicans and Democrats," Garcia said, according to the Washington Times. "He is the person that appears almost more than anyone else" in the Epstein files.
The deposition was briefly paused after Representative Lauren Boebert shared a photograph of Clinton taken during the closed-door session with conservative influencer Benny Johnson. Garcia called the move "completely against the rules," and Clinton said she found the incident "very upsetting." Boebert later wrote on X, "Benny did nothing wrong. Proceeding with deposition."
