Bill Clinton sat for a deposition before the House Oversight Committee on Friday and faced questions about a photo that has dogged him for good reason: a shot of the former president lounging in a hot tub with an unidentified woman, taken during a 2002 trip to Asia aboard Jeffrey Epstein's private jet.
The New York Post reported that Clinton insisted he did "nothing wrong" and claimed he did not have sex with the woman, whose face was redacted from the image. According to a source, he also denied knowing who she was.
The photo was taken in the Emperor suite of the Empire Hotel in Brunei, a room that reportedly runs $20,000 a night.
Additional images from the same evening show Epstein sitting at the piano in sweatpants and Clinton with Ghislaine Maxwell and the mystery woman in a pool. The pictures surfaced through the Department of Justice's file dumps, and a Post analysis matched the travel to Epstein's flight logs.
The trip took place in May 2002, roughly one year after Clinton left office. Flight entries show that Epstein's plane, the infamous "Lolita Express," picked up Clinton and his chief advisor Doug Band at a U.S. naval air base in Japan on May 22, 2002.
Already on board were Epstein, Maxwell, Epstein associate Sarah Kellen, and passengers identified only as "Mike," "Janice," and "Jessica."
From Japan, the group stopped in Hong Kong for an evening, then spent two nights in Shenzhen, China, before landing in the Brunei capital of Bandar Seri Begawan on May 25.
Once in Brunei, Clinton played golf and had dinner with Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah. Then he took his dip in the jacuzzi.
The cast of characters on this trip is worth sitting with for a moment. Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted sex predator. Ghislaine Maxwell was later convicted of sex trafficking.
Sarah Kellen was one of Epstein's named associates. And the Sultan of Brunei, Clinton's golf partner and dinner host, has been accused of hosting sex parties with underage girls.
This is the man Clinton chose to visit, on a plane owned by a pedophile, accompanied by the pedophile's convicted madam, one year after leaving the most powerful office on earth. He described the trip as related to work for the Clinton Foundation.
The Sultan, for his part, reportedly donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton presidential library through the foundation. So at minimum, the "foundation work" had a transactional flavor.
Clinton has repeatedly denied wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. That denial now has to account for photographic evidence placing him in a hot tub with an unidentified woman in a $20,000 hotel suite during a multi-country trip on a convicted sex trafficker's private jet.
The identity of the woman remains unknown. Her face was redacted. Clinton says he doesn't know who she is. The House Oversight Committee apparently found that answer insufficient enough to press further under oath.
For decades, the political establishment treated the Clinton-Epstein connection as a conspiracy theory best left to the fringes. The flight logs were dismissed as circumstantial.
The photographs were buried in DOJ files. The questions were waved away by a media class that had every resource to investigate and every incentive not to.
The fact that a former president is being deposed by Congress about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is extraordinary. It should have happened years ago. The DOJ sat on these files.
The mainstream press showed almost no curiosity about a powerful man's repeated travel with a known predator. The story only advances now because the documents were released and people outside the legacy media bothered to read them.
Consider the details that are still missing. We don't know the identity of the woman in the hot tub. We don't have full identification for several passengers on the flight. We don't know what happened on the stops in Hong Kong and Shenzhen.
The trip lasted days across multiple countries, and the public accounting remains remarkably thin for a journey involving a former president and a sex trafficker.
Clinton says he did nothing wrong. The photos say he was in the room. The flight logs say he was on the plane. The foundation records say the money flowed. The House Oversight Committee, at long last, is asking the questions that should have been asked twenty years ago.
The answers, if they ever come, belong to the American public. They've waited long enough.
