A Democratic lawmaker Thursday revealed several insights about what happened inside the room where former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was pressed by the House Oversight Committee about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein — explaining she did not know him.
Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA) told CNN anchor Jake Tapper that Clinton explained she had never met the late financier and convicted child sex offender, and she did not have a relationship with his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
"We would like the transcript to be released within 24 hours because the reality is she ran circles around the Republicans the entire time," Subramanyam said. "It's still going and she's answering every single question being asked. But the reality is we should be interviewing people who actually had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who knew the guy, who at least met the guy and know about his crimes. There's so many people in the files and Hillary Clinton is not someone we should be focusing on."
Subramanyam brought up how zero Republicans attended Les Wexner's testimony in Ohio last week, yet 11 Republicans were in upstate New York on Thursday. He also called out Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) for taking photos and sending them to a MAGA influencer who posted them during the closed-door meeting and violating the committee's rules, and pausing the entire testimony.
"This is a closed-door deposition. This isn't a family vacation. I don't know why she's secretly snapping photos," Subramanyam said.
"She demanded that if you're going to snap photos privately, why not let the entire media in? That was their demand, actually, to make up for it, but again, Republicans refused to do that," Subramanyam said. "This is a political sideshow. This did not help our investigation at all."
Subramanyam said it was time for the Trump administration to release the full files and that the president should testify, along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
"I wish the press could have come in and just watched the whole thing," Subramanyam said. "I think what they would have seen and what the American public would have seen was basically Republicans embarrassing themselves. Some of the questions had nothing to do with Epstein and Maxwell, and our investigation, and were very much irrelevant to it. And so, again, this was perhaps part of the plan, was to sort of shift the blame and shift the tension from [President Donald] Trump and the Republicans to a Democrat like Hillary Clinton. But the reality was that she simply never met the guy, and it was a waste of our time."
Tapper mentioned that there were reportedly questions from lawmakers about the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and UFOs, and asked if those were actual questions in the hearing. Subramanyam said he could not reveal what was said, but that the video transcript could shed more light on what happened in the closed-door testimony.
"The transcript will be very revealing about that," Subramanyam said.