GOP’s Hillary crusade collapses under friendly fire

Everything in the Trump era is a reality show, and the producers are desperate for a ratings bump. So for more than six hours on Thursday, House Republicans had their dream witness in front of them for a sworn deposition. But like any good reality reunion episode, it was all brought to a screeching halt not long after it began when a right-wing podcaster posted a picture from inside the room of what was supposed to be a closed-door testimony.  

Hillary Clinton gave roughly six hours of testimony in Chappaqua, New York, to the House Oversight Committee, telling congressional investigators she had never met convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and had no knowledge of his crimes, and it went exactly how most people thought it would. 

It was supposed to be the Republican Party‘s ultimate revenge fantasy. They wanted the base to salivate over the idea that, at long last, the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee would be forced to answer tough questions. Instead, thanks to their own hubristic overreach and compulsive need for social media clout, the whole thing quickly imploded. 

Before the deposition started, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado posted a photo of herself and fellow Republicans heading into the session, captioned with “Game on.” Boebert, who previously live-tweeted the location of then-Vice President Mike Pence during the Jan. 6 attack, has never met a moment of solemn responsibility she couldn’t convert into content.

Before the GOP committee members had even warmed their seats, Boebert pulled out her phone, snapped a photo of Clinton and texted it straight to Benny Johnson, a conservative influencer and former BuzzFeed writer who was fired from that outlet for plagiarism. Johnson, who has been identified as having received funding from the Kremlin-linked organization Tenet Media, immediately posted it to his X account with the breathless caption: “BREAKING: The first image of Hillary Clinton testifying under oath about Jeffery Epstein to the Republican Oversight Committee.”

The committee’s own rules, read aloud at the start of the proceedings, explicitly prohibited photography inside the room. The hearing abruptly went off the record as staff scrambled to figure out who had violated House rules. Clinton’s adviser Nick Merrill stepped outside to inform the waiting press, directing reporters to check Johnson’s social media feed to see exactly what had happened. The secretary’s team, which had been pushing for a fully public proceeding from the very beginning — the committee had rejected that request — suddenly had an unambiguous example that Republicans can’t even handle a closed-door session without leaking to their propagandists. 

Democrats on the committee immediately demanded Comer release the full unedited transcript and video within 24 hours. Ranking member Robert Garcia, D-Calif., said he was “very taken aback” by the rules being “not enforced and certainly just broken immediately.” Virginia Rep. James Walkinshaw described the whole exercise as part of a “long-running fever dream” to lock up Clinton.

When reporters asked Boebert why she had sent the photo, the congresswoman offered this gem: “Well, I mean I really admired her blue suit. So I wanted to capture that for everyone.” Boebert later posted that “Benny did nothing wrong.”

Democrats on the committee argued from the outset that transparency was the best disinfectant. But Republicans insisted on a closed-door format, presumably to control the narrative and selectively leak whatever snippets suited their storyline.

After the pause, Clinton reportedly asked that journalists be allowed into the room. That didn’t happen. When the hearing resumed, what followed was, by all accounts, a catastrophic embarrassment for the committee — one entirely of its own making. Clinton, who had stated in a four-page opening statement shared publicly on social media that she had “no knowledge that would assist your investigation,” proceeded to spend the better part of six hours saying exactly that. 

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“You have compelled me to testify, fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation, in order to distract attention from President Trump’s actions and to cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers,” she said to Republicans. 

Hillary Clinton is not even prominently featured in the Epstein files. Meanwhile, there are well-documented connections between Epstein and a number of powerful men, including Trump. The president and Epstein were photographed together multiple times in the 1990s and early 2000s. Epstein thought of himself as Trump’s “closest friend,” and Trump once described Epstein as a “terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side.” Yet Republicans have shown remarkably little appetite for aggressively interrogating Trump about those ties. Clinton also highlighted the fact that not a single Republican had attended a recent closed-door deposition of retail billionaire Leslie Wexner in Ohio, one of Epstein’s most significant former associates and a major donor to GOP candidates.

“I don’t know how many times I had to say I did not know Jeffrey Epstein,” she told reporters afterward, standing outside the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center. “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 was also, according to her own post-deposition account, asked about UFOs. And Pizzagate. By members of the House Oversight Committee, in a deposition theoretically focused on a sex-trafficking investigation.

This is the pattern Republicans learned decades ago: When your own administration is mired in scandal, invoke the Clintons. It’s a reflex so ingrained deeply ingrained in the GOP’s DNA it deserves a name: Clinton Derangement Syndrome. The mere mention of Hillary Clinton’s name is enough to redirect conservative media cycles away from whatever fire is currently consuming their own house.

This is the actual Epstein scandal hiding in plain sight, right behind the carnival mirror of the Clinton witch hunt. This week, the Department of Justice quietly removed from its public Epstein file portal an authenticated photograph of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick standing alongside Jeffrey Epstein on Little St. James — the island where the convicted sex offender’s crimes against young women took place. CBS News confirmed the photo was real. A spokesperson for the DOJ claimed the image was “part of a batch of files that had been flagged for nudity,” but every man in the photograph is fully clothed. The photo was later restored after CBS published its story, but the damage to the administration’s credibility — such as it is — was already done. Now that Republicans on the committee have been cornered, they are calling on Lutnick to testify. 

This deposition was supposed to be Kentucky Rep. James Comer’s big shot: a marquee moment in the long-running effort to re-litigate the Clinton era and tie it to Epstein in the public imagination. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about the perils of governing-by-influencer. In the end, Boebert and Johnson did more than briefly derail a deposition. They exposed the hollowness at the core of this latest Clinton crusade. When your investigation can be derailed by a thirst for retweets, it was never about truth in the first place.