Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as Governor of Arkansas and as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. After leaving office he established the Clinton Foundation and traveled internationally on its behalf, including on aircraft owned by Jeffrey Epstein. Flight logs entered into civil litigation list Clinton on flights aboard Epstein's Boeing 727, the aircraft journalists later nicknamed the "Lolita Express." Clinton has denied knowledge of Epstein's sexual offenses and has denied visiting Epstein's private island, Little St. James. No court, prosecutor, or official investigation has produced evidence that Clinton committed a crime in connection with Epstein.¹²

Governor of Arkansas and the Mena Drug Operations

As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton presided over the period when Barry Seal operated his Central Intelligence Agency-connected cocaine smuggling operation at Mena airport. Clinton's close friend Danny Ray Lasater was convicted as part of a major drug ring in Little Rock, raising questions about what the governor knew about the activities at Mena.¹⁶

Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson testified that troopers were aware "that there was large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena airport" and that "it was a CIA operation." Despite the scale of Seal's operations, which a letter from the Arkansas attorney general to U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese valued at 3 billion to 5 billion dollars in smuggled drugs, the state government took no action to shut down the operation. Clinton's administration in Arkansas presided over the period when the Mena airport served as a hub for both drug trafficking and Contra supply operations.¹⁶

Project Stargate

As president, Clinton's administration oversaw the 1995 declassification and termination of the STARGATE PROJECT, the government's remote-viewing program, after a CIA-commissioned review concluded the program had no demonstrated intelligence value. The Remote Viewers account does not detail any direct involvement by Clinton in the program, but notes that William Perry, who served as Clinton's Secretary of Defense, had earlier been involved in funding decisions for the program during the Carter administration.¹⁵

Epstein Contacts and Flight Logs

Epstein donated 1,000 dollars to Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and contributed to later Democratic fundraising, and Clinton Foundation records show a 25,000 dollar contribution from an Epstein-linked foundation in 2006, according to a timeline compiled by ABC News. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were recorded as visitors during Clinton's presidency and were photographed at White House events. Clinton's spokesman has said the former president met Epstein privately on two occasions after leaving office, once at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse and once at the Clinton Global Initiative offices in Harlem.¹

Flight logs released in civil litigation and later in document tranches list Clinton on flights aboard Epstein's Boeing 727, registration N908JE. Reporting on the logs in 2016 noted Clinton appearing on at least 26 flight "legs," a figure that counts individual segments of multi-stop trips rather than distinct journeys, and noted that he traveled on at least some legs without his Secret Service detail. Maxwell, recorded in the logs by the initials "GM," appears on the trips, as do entries read as the initials of Epstein assistant Sarah Kellen. The logs record who boarded which aircraft and when; they do not, on their face, establish what occurred at any destination.²³

FactCheck.org, reviewing the manifests, counted six trips comprising the 26 flights between February 2002 and November 2003, the discrepancy between trip and leg counts arising from whether each take-off and landing is tallied separately. The documented segments included a February 2002 Miami-to-Westchester hop, a round trip from New York to London in March 2002, a May 2002 sequence through Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Brunei, a July 2002 stop tied to a wedding in Morocco, the September 2002 Africa tour, and a November 2003 routing through Brussels, Oslo, Hong Kong, and Beijing. President Donald Trump in 2025 claimed Clinton flew on the plane "27 or 28 times," a characterization FactCheck.org described as conflating the leg total with the number of trips; the same review found no flight log placing Clinton on an aircraft bound for the U.S. Virgin Islands.¹¹

Maxwell, deposed in the Giuffre litigation, stated of the island that "just so we are clear, the allegations that Clinton had a meal on Jeffrey's island is 100 percent false." On one of the 2003 legs, from Oslo to the Russian city of Novosibirsk, the manifest listed Clinton, Epstein, the aide Doug Band, and individuals identified by the initials "GM" and "SK." No court, prosecutor, or official investigation has produced a finding that Clinton witnessed or participated in any crime aboard the aircraft.¹²²

2002 Africa Trip

Clinton departed on September 21, 2002, on a roughly nine-day trip through several African nations to advance the Clinton Foundation's early work on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, including efforts to expand access to antiretroviral medication for mothers with HIV. The itinerary ran through Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, and South Africa and included a day spent with former South African President Nelson Mandela. FactCheck.org and reporting on the manifests counted this single trip as accounting for roughly 11 of the 26 logged flight legs.⁴¹¹

The manifest for the outbound leg from New York to the Azores listed Clinton, the actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker, Epstein, Maxwell, and roughly a dozen others including Doug Band, the investor Ron Burkle, Casey Wasserman, former Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, and Clinton aides. Chris Tucker appears in the records on the outbound and subsequent legs of the African routing. Spacey, named on the flight log, later said he had flown with Epstein and a group described as young women and characterized his presence as incidental to the Foundation trip; he was never accused of wrongdoing in connection with it.⁴⁵

The trip was arranged in part through Doug Band, who served as a central organizer of Clinton's post-presidential travel and of the Foundation's network of donors and contacts during this period. Clinton said through a spokesman in 2002 that he regarded Epstein as "both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets." After Epstein's 2019 arrest, Clinton's spokesman said the trips "included stops in connection with the work of The Clinton Foundation."⁵¹

Denials and Statements

After Epstein's July 2019 federal arrest, Clinton's spokesman Angel Urena issued a statement saying Clinton "knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York." The statement said Clinton had taken trips on Epstein's plane in 2002 and 2003 in connection with Foundation work, that staff and his Secret Service detail traveled on every leg, that Clinton had not spoken to Epstein "in well over a decade," and that Clinton "has never been to Little St. James Island." The reference in that statement to Secret Service traveling on every leg sits alongside reporting on the logs indicating Clinton flew at least some segments without his detail, a discrepancy his office has not separately reconciled in public.¹²

In his 2024 memoir Citizen, Clinton wrote that he wished he had never met Epstein, that traveling on Epstein's plane "was not worth the years of questioning afterward," and that he and Epstein discussed only "politics and economics." Clinton again denied visiting Little St. James and wrote that he had stopped contact with Epstein by the time of Epstein's 2005-2006 legal troubles in Florida. Clinton wrote that he had thought Epstein "odd" but had no knowledge of his crimes.⁶

In a deposition compelled by the House Oversight Committee, conducted behind closed doors in late February 2026 near the Clintons' home in Chappaqua, New York, Clinton again denied any knowledge of Epstein's offenses, stating "I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong" and "I saw nothing that ever gave me pause." It was the first time a former president had been compelled to testify before a congressional panel. In his opening remarks Clinton objected to the committee's separate deposition of his wife Hillary Clinton, saying she "had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein" and "has no memory of even meeting him." Hillary Clinton was deposed and said she had no information relevant to the inquiry. Video of both depositions was released in early March 2026. Neither has been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.¹³¹⁴

References in Unsealed and Released Documents

Documents unsealed in January 2024 in the defamation case Giuffre v. Maxwell included deposition testimony from Johanna Sjoberg, given in 2015, in which she testified that Epstein had once said "Clinton likes them young," which she clarified referred to "girls." Sjoberg attributed the remark to Epstein as something he said and not as a statement of her own knowledge about Clinton, and said she understood Epstein to have had "dealings" with him. The same filings referenced a 2011 account in which Virginia Giuffre said she had seen Clinton on Epstein's island; Giuffre later said she did not witness a helicopter flight she had earlier described, and she made no allegation of wrongdoing by Clinton. Reporting on the January 2024 release noted that the documents did not implicate any previously unnamed person and contained no accusation of a crime by Clinton. A judge in the Maxwell litigation had previously denied a request to depose Clinton.⁷⁸

Materials released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee and the Department of Justice included flight records, estate documents, and a "birthday book" assembled by Maxwell for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. The committee made the contents public in September 2025, and the panel released more than 33,000 pages from the Justice Department on September 2, 2025. The book contained an entry attributed to Clinton, the wording of which, as released by the committee, included the line "It's reassuring isn't it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and [illegible], and also to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends," signed "Bill Clinton." Outlets reporting on the documents noted that the materials did not implicate Clinton in any crime.⁹¹⁰

On December 19, 2025, in accordance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which set that date as the deadline for Attorney General Pam Bondi to publish the unclassified federal records, the Justice Department released several hundred thousand documents, many heavily redacted. Across the 2025 and 2026 releases, totaling more than 60,000 pages by late 2025, no document established a criminal allegation against Clinton, and reporting consistently noted that his name appeared in connection with the flight logs, social contacts, and the birthday book rather than any accusation by a survivor.¹⁰¹⁴