Former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton criticised her deposition in front of a congressional committee relating to the scandal surrounding sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, calling it “very long” and “repetitive”.

Following Thursday’s closed-door hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee, which lasted about six hours, Mrs Clinton said she “answered every one of their questions as fully as I could based on what I knew”.

The former secretary of state told reporters in Chappaqua, New York, that she had shared what she knew in her written opening statement.

Mrs Clinton said it was “disappointing that they refused to hold a public hearing”, meaning that she had to recount the content of her statements to the press instead. She also characterised her deposition as “very long” and “repetitive”.

“We returned to answer questions repetitively, literally over and over again. I don’t know how many times I had to say ‘I did not know Jeffrey Epstein. I never went to his island. I never went to his homes. I never went to his offices.’ “So, it’s on the record numerous times,” she told reporters.

Mrs Clinton said that she also testified that she knew Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, “casually as an acquaintance”.

She went on to say that the questioning towards the end got “quite unusual because I started being asked about UFOs and a series of questions about Pizzagate, one of the most vile, bogus conspiracy theories that were propagated on the internet, that was serving as the basis of a member’s questions to me”.

Representative Suhas Subramanyam, a Democratic member of the House Oversight Committee, told broadcaster CNN that Mrs Clinton’s deposition was a “political clown show” and that the committee should be “interviewing people who actually had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who knew the guy, or at least met the guy”.

Mrs Clinton and her husband refused to testify for months before the U.S. Congress in the investigation into the Epstein case. They accused the Republican chairman of the committee, James Comer, of conducting a politically motivated process.

After her deposition, the former secretary of state commended Mr Comer “for raising a series of significant questions that I responded to about the nature of the investigation and the areas that I thought should be explored”.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton is scheduled to testify before the committee on Friday.

Mr Clinton’s name and pictures of him appear in documents related to the Epstein investigations. However, a mention in itself means nothing.

The former president has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in connection with his acquaintance with Epstein.

Mr Epstein operated an abuse ring for years, victimising dozens of young women and minors. He died in his prison cell in 2019, before a conviction could be reached.

(dpa/NAN)