Former President Bill Clinton is testifying Friday before members of Congress who are investigating convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, answering for his connections to the disgraced financier from more than two decades ago.
The closed-door deposition in Chappaqua, New York, will mark the first time a former president has been compelled to testify to Congress. It comes a day after Clinton’s wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sat with lawmakers for her own deposition.
Meanwhile President Donald Trump is traveling to Texas on Friday to talk about his energy and economic policies amid a red-hot Senate Republican primary race. All three GOP candidates are expected to join him, just days before the election.
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Republicans in the House Oversight Committee majority asked Clinton questions for about an hour, followed by an hour from the Democratic minority, chairman James Comer told reporters outside.
Comer said Republicans would get another hour before a break. He said the day would be at about “the halfway point” by then, suggesting Clinton will spend at least six hours with lawmakers.Comer: Bill Clinton has taken about two hours of questions
Trump on Friday put himself among the many who have misquoted a famous sentiment from the 30th U.S. president.
“President Calvin Coolidge: ‘The Business of America is BUSINESS!’” he wrote in a Truth Social post as he headed to Texas aboard Air Force One.
However, this isn’t exactly what Coolidge said. His actual words, said during an address in Washington to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on Jan. 17, 1925, were: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business.”
Coolidge was talking about the “double purpose” of American newspapers -- providing readers with information while also having their own business interests. He concluded that this dual role did not “seem to be cause for alarm.”
Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island said Trump has failed to explain the rationale or the risks involved in military action.
“President Trump’s saber-rattling for war with Iran is taking the country down a dangerous path without a clear strategy or endgame and putting U.S. national security at considerable risk,” Reed said in a statement.
As the House and Senate prepare for votes next week on war powers resolutions, he said Congress has received “no real briefings” on the administration’s plans.
“The administration has not presented Congress or the American people with any coherent legal or strategic justification for preemptive strikes,” Reed said. “The president is the Commander-In-Chief, but Congress alone holds the constitutional authority to authorize war.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Friday a bipartisan coalition is working to force a vote as soon as next week on a war powers resolution that would attempt to prevent any U.S. action against Iran without approval from Congress.
“The American people don’t want another failed forever foreign war, particularly in the Middle East, when we know the outcome is likely to be disastrous,” Jeffries said on MSNow.
“What we’ve got to do right now, of course, is to do everything we can to prevent that from happening,” he said. “It would be reckless. It would be dangerous. It would be harmful to America’s national security interests.”
As the Department of Homeland Security remains shut down, the White House and Democratic leaders are continuing to exchange proposals to end the impasse.
A White House official said Friday that the administration sent another counteroffer to Democrats on Thursday. The official, granted anonymity to discuss private negotiations, called the offer “serious.”
Federal funding for DHS lapsed Jan. 30, with Democrats calling for more restrictions on the behavior of federal immigration agents in the aftermath of the death of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota.
But most of DHS provides critical governments, which means that federal employees are working -- but not getting paid.
Pam Bondi says federal prosecutors have indicted 30 more people tied to a protest at a Minnesota church over an immigration enforcement crackdown.
Bondi says 25 of those people are already under arrest. The protest on Jan. 18 also led to the arrests of independent journalist Don Lemon and local activist Nekima Levy Armstrong. Both have pleaded not guilty to civil rights charges.
Trump officials have strongly condemned the protest for interrupting a church service. Protesters took the action after learning a pastor there is also an immigration enforcement official.
In comments to reporters as he left the White House, Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio was negotiating at a high level with the Cuban government.
“The Cuban government is talking with us” the president said. “They have no money. They have no anything right now.” He added: “We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
After his administration ousted Cuban ally and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Trump for weeks suggested Cuba was on the brink of collapse economically.
He didn’t say what he meant by a “friendly takeover” but suggested that after decades “of dealing with Cuba” something could happen that’d be “very positive” for Cuban exiles living in the U.S.
“I’m not happy with the fact that they’re not willing to give us what we have to have. I’m not thrilled with that. We’ll see what happens. We’re talking later,” Trump said to reporters as he left the White House.
Trump said it would be “wonderful” if Iran negotiated “in good faith and conscience,” but said, “They are not getting there.”
Trump was asked about the risks of the U.S. getting involved in a drawn-out conflict in the Middle East if it launches strikes on Iran.
“I guess you could say there’s always a risk,” Trump replied. “You know, when there’s war, there’s a risk of anything, both good and bad.”
Trump said on Friday that he is not pleased with the deposition of former President Bill Clinton in the House Epstein investigation.
“I like Bill Clinton and I don’t like seeing him deposed,” the president told reporters as he departed the White House en route to Corpus Christi, Texas.
“It should be incredibly obvious” that three years between launches is unacceptable, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said, urging the space agency to cut the gap between Artemis flights to one year or less if it hopes to return astronauts to the moon on a sustainable schedule.
Isaacman unveiled an Artemis program overhaul Friday that adds an extra mission before any lunar landing by astronauts. Instead of attempting to land astronauts on the moon an estimated three years after the upcoming lunar fly-around, NASA will launch astronauts into orbit around Earth in their Orion capsule and have them practice docking with an orbiting lunar lander.
This new plan has the possibility of securing one and maybe two moon landings in 2028, during Trump’s second term.
The move aims to build momentum after repeated rocket repairs and warnings from a safety advisory panel. Isaacman noted that NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs flew in rapid succession before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s landing on the moon in 1969.
“No one here at NASA forgot their history books,” Isaacman said.
Bill Clinton says in his prepared statement that “no person is above the law, even presidents.” He agreed to testify, he adds, because, “I love my country.”
Bill and Hillary Clinton initially pushed back against subpoenas they called a partisan stunt by Republicans. They yielded but demanded proceedings be opened. Republicans refused.
“The search for truth and justice,” Clinton planned to tell lawmakers, is more important than “the partisan urge to score points and create spectacle.”
He added a wish that political discourse be ratcheted down.
“Democracy requires every person to play their part, and I hope that by being her today, we can bring ourselves a little further away from the brink and back to being a country where we can disagree with one another civilly,” he says, adding, “I’ll do my part, and I hope you’ll do yours.”
“That might be unsatisfying,” the former president says of his plans to answer some questions by saying he has no recollection. “But I’m not going to say something I’m not sure of. This was all a long time ago.”
Clinton adds that he is “bound by my oath not to speculate, or to guess” -- a standard he says “is not merely for my benefit but because it doesn’t help you for me to play detective 24 years later.”
Elsewhere in his prepared opening remarks, Bill Clinton is more emphatic about his own actions.
“I know what I saw, and more importantly, what I didn’t see,” he says. “I know what I did, and more importantly, what I didn’t do.”
“As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing — I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals,” Bill Clinton says in his prepared opening statement.
“We are only here because he hid it from everyone so well for so long.”
The former president says in his prepared opening remarks that his wife — the former secretary of state and first lady — should never have been ensnared by the committee.
“Before we start, I have to get personal,” Bill Clinton says in his statement. “You made Hillary come in. She had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. Nothing. She has no memory of even meeting him. She neither traveled with him nor visited any of his properties.”
He continues: “Whether you subpoenaed 10 people or 10,000, including her was simply not right.”
And he tells lawmakers that, just as he’s bound in sworn testimony, “each and every one of you owes nothing less than truth and accuracy to the American people.”
The former president is telling the House Oversight Committee that his “brief acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein ended years before his crimes came to light.”
That’s according to a printed copy of his opening statement as it was prepared and released by Clinton’s office.
“I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong,” Clinton says. “I saw nothing that ever gave me pause.”
Clinton’s remarks state that he is testifying “to offer what little I know so that it might prevent anything like this from ever happening again” and because “the girls and women whose lives Jeffrey Epstein destroyed deserve not only justice, but healing.”
The Texas Republican fighting for reelection in a March 3 primary is flying with Trump back to his home state.
Cornyn was spotted at Andrews Air Force Base ahead of Trump’s departure from Washington for an event in Corpus Christi. The other Texas senator, Ted Cruz, is also traveling with the president, but he is not on the ballot this year.
Cornyn is locked in a viciously personal three-way primary with state Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt. Missing the coveted endorsement from Trump, all three have been trying to highlight their ties to him as campaigning intensifies ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
“We’re going to ask President Clinton the hard questions today,” said Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va. “What is truth about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? But let’s be real. We’re talking to the wrong president today.”
Democrats hope to leverage the Clintons’ appearances before House Oversight. They’ve noted that files released so far suggest Trump was more closely involved with Epstein than Clinton. And they want to emphasize that it’s the former president who is submitting to questions while the sitting president denies any involvement.
“President Trump is the one who is blocking our investigation. President Trump is the one who wants us to go away, but it will not go away,” Subramanyam said.
“I think it was telling that Secretary Clinton did not take the Fifth one time,” Garcia told reporters, referring to the constitutional protection defendants and witnesses sometimes cite when declining to answer questions in legal proceedings.
Garcia continued: “I think it’s important the president (Bill Clinton) do the same. I think he will answer questions today.”
Mace described Hillary Clinton “screaming” during her deposition on Thursday.
“I hope that President Clinton is less unhinged than his wife was yesterday,” Mace said Friday outside the building where the House Oversight panel is convening.
Democrats dismissed Mace’s description, which Rep. Robert Garcia said proves the need for Comer to release the “full, unedited” video. The Clintons had wanted to testify publicly but Comer insisted on the private sessions.
Garcia called the Republican questioning Thursday a “disgrace” focused on old “conspiracy theories.” He praised Hillary Clinton for participating.
He reminded reporters Friday that Democrats still want the proceedings to be open “so that you can hear the answer and the questions directly.”
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said ahead of Bill Clinton’s testimony Friday that Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick should answer questions before the House Oversight Committee.
The secretary has admitted meeting Epstein after previously denying knowing him.
After Hillary Clinton’s testimony on Thursday, Comer would not rule out asking Lutnick to appear for questioning.
Chairman James Comey says he’ll send Republican members of his House Oversight Committee out to update reporters as Bill Clinton is being deposed.
Comey also promised to release video and transcripts of Hillary Clinton’s testimony.
The Clintons had wanted to testify in public, but the Republicans in control insisted on closed-door depositions. Democrats on the committee called for Comey to release the full video of the former secretary of state’s Thursday session.
Scouting America says it is waiving registration fees for military families and creating a merit badge that focuses on military services and veterans after months of talks with the Defense Department.
The organization released its statement Friday after Hegseth said it was altering policies about transgender kids, among other changes. But Scouting America’s statement did not mention transgender youth.
“Scouting America held firm on the core commitments that define us. We maintained our name as ‘Scouting America’ and preserved our service to the more than 200,000 girls who participate in our programs,” the organization said.
Scouting America, formerly known as the Boy Scouts, said it has been talking with Defense Department officials for months as the Pentagon takes aim at the military’s partnership with the organization. Hegseth said he wants to root out scouting’s “woke culture.”
The Secretary of State will make a quick trip to Israel early next week as tensions between the United States and Iran soar amid a massive buildup of U.S. forces in the Middle East, the State Department said Friday.
The department said in a statement that Rubio would visit Israel on Monday and Tuesday to “discuss a range of regional priorities including Iran, Lebanon, and ongoing efforts to implement President Trump’s 20-Point Peace Plan for Gaza.” It offered no other details.
The announcement comes just hours after the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem implemented “authorized departure” status for nonessential personnel and family members, which means that eligible staffers can leave the country voluntarily at government expense.
The U.S. Embassy in Israel urged anyone considering departure to do so immediately on Friday, as the threat of an American strike on Iran looms.
The email from Ambassador Mike Huckabee to embassy employees was recounted to The Associated Press by someone involved with the U.S. mission who wasn’t authorized to share details. Sent before 10:30 a.m., it urged staff considering departure to get on any flight out of Israel and then make their way to Washington.
There’s no need for panic, Huckabee wrote, but for those desiring to leave, it was important to make plans soon. “While there may be outbound flights over the coming days, there may not be,” Huckabee wrote.
Iran and the United States walked away from nuclear negotiations Thursday without a deal. Vice President JD Vance is scheduled to meet Friday in Washington with a mediator, Oman’s foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting is private.
— Sam Mednick and Sam Metz
“The Clintons haven’t answered very many, if any, questions about their knowledge or involvement with Epstein and Maxwell,” Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, said Thursday. “No one’s accusing, at this moment, the Clintons of any wrongdoing,” he added.
But Hillary Clinton said she had answered their questions — telling lawmakers she had no knowledge of how Epstein had sexually abused underage girls and had no recollection of even meeting him.
Bill Clinton will have to answer questions about his well-documented relationship with Epstein and his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Hillary Clinton said she expected her husband to testify that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s sexual abuse at the time they knew each other.
U.S. stocks are sinking as Wall Street gets back to hunting and punishing potential losers in the artificial-intelligence revolution. A surprisingly discouraging update on inflation also hurt the market.
The report showed U.S. wholesale inflation at 2.9% last month, much higher than the 1.6% economists expected. It’s so much worse than expected that it could help persuade the Federal Reserve to hold off longer on the interest rate cuts that Trump constantly pushes for. Lower rates would give the economy and prices for investments a boost, but they risk worsening inflation at the same time.
Oil prices also jumped amid worries of military conflict between the United States and Iran.
Joe Biden’s appearance in a boarding area awaiting a flight to South Carolina drew a crowd Friday morning at the airport near downtown Washington.
The former president is spending Friday evening with Democrats in South Carolina who have organized a thank you event to commemorate his thunderous victory in the state’s 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
Other passengers were primarily deterred by the dozen Secret Service agents who surrounded Biden as he sat at the gate. But Biden took selfies with American Airlines employees, and dozens of passengers in the area filmed him on their cellphones.
Once on board awaiting takeoff, passengers passed by to shake Biden’s hand. “God bless you, sir,” one woman said.
Scouting America will alter several policies at the urging of the Pentagon, including a requirement that members use “biological sex at birth and not gender identity,” Pete Hegseth announced Friday.
Some of the changes mirror what the organization suggested in January in response to Defense Department pressure. Hegseth has taken aim at the military’s partnership with Scouting America, decrying its historic rebrand to include girls and other “woke culture” efforts he wants to root out. He said in video posted on X that the Pentagon will “vigorously review” the changes in six months and cease its support of Scouting America if it fails to comply.
“Ideally I believe the Boy Scouts should go back to being the Boy Scouts as originally founded, a group that develops boys into men. Maybe someday,” Hegseth said.
Scouting America didn’t immediately comment.
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After criticism by lawmakers, the FAA, CBP and the Pentagon issued a joint statement late Thursday acknowledging that the military responded to a “seemingly threatening unmanned aerial system operating within military airspace” over Texas.
Congressional Democrats said it was a laser that shot down a Border Protection drone, prompting the Federal Aviation Administration to shut down Texas airspace for the second time in two weeks. Illinois Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, the ranking member on the Senate’s Aviation Subcommittee, called for an independent investigation into what she calls Trump administration “incompetence” causing “chaos in our skies.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he was planning to brief members of Congress about the incident.
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About 6 in 10 U.S. adults favor the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, according to the new polling.
That’s not significantly different from recent years, as at least half of U.S. adults have supported an independent Palestinian state since 2020.
But there’s been an uptick among Democrats and independents in support for the two-state solution. About three-quarters of Democrats and roughly 6 in 10 independents say they support an independent Palestinian state.
The opinions of the people who would be directly affected by a two-state solution are quite different, according to separate Gallup polling. Only about 3 in 10 Israelis living in Israel and Palestinians living in the West Bank and east Jerusalem say they support a two-state solution.
Americans’ changing sentiment has been largely driven by Democrats, who are now much more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with the Israelis.
The Gallup polling shows that about two-thirds of Democrats say their concerns lie more with the Palestinians, while only about 2 in 10 sympathize more with the Israelis.
Democrats’ sympathy for the Palestinians intensified as the war progressed, Gallup’s polling shows, and independents’ views also shifted.
This year, independents expressed more sympathy for the Palestinians than the Israelis for the first time in Gallup’s trend. About 4 in 10 independents are more sympathetic toward the Palestinians, compared to about 3 in 10 for the Israelis.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Thursday that the artificial intelligence company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s demands to allow unrestricted use of its technology, deepening a public clash with the Trump administration that is threatening to pull its contract and take other drastic steps by Friday.
The maker of the AI chatbot Claude said in a statement that it’s not walking away from negotiations but that new contract language received from the Defense Department “made virtually no progress on preventing Claude’s use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons.”
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, said earlier on social media that the military “has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement.”
Anthropic is the last of its peers — the Pentagon also has contracts with Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI — to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network.
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Family friends of a nearly blind refugee from Myanmar who died after U.S. Border Patrol agents dropped him off at a doughnut shop in Buffalo speak out.
A nearly blind refugee from Myanmar who disappeared after U.S. Border Patrol agents dropped him off at a Buffalo doughnut shop was found dead on the street five days later, prompting a police investigation and complaints from city officials that he’d been abandoned without care for his safety.
Nurul Amin Shah Alam, 56, was detained by Border Patrol agents on Feb. 19 after his release from a county jail, but was let go that same day after federal authorities determined he wasn’t eligible for deportation.
The agents brought him to a Tim Hortons restaurant north of Buffalo’s downtown and dropped him there, authorities and advocates said. His family, which had initially expected him to walk out of jail, wasn’t informed he had been released. Shah Alam’s lawyer reported him missing to Buffalo police on Feb. 22 after learning that an area immigration detention center didn’t have him in custody.
Shah Alam was found dead Tuesday night. It was unclear when he died.
Khaleda Shah, a family friend and spokesperson, said the family wants justice.
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Iran and the United States held hours of indirect negotiations Thursday over Tehran’s nuclear program but walked away without a deal, leaving the danger of another Mideast war on the table as the U.S. has gathered a massive fleet of aircraft and warships in the region.
Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, who mediated the talks in Geneva, said there had been “significant progress in the negotiation” without elaborating.
But just before the talks ended, Iranian state television reported that Tehran was determined to continue enriching uranium, rejected proposals to transfer it abroad and sought the lifting of international sanctions, indicating it was not prepared to meet Trump’s demands.
Al-Busaidi said technical talks involving lower-level representatives would continue next week in Vienna, the home of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The United Nations’ atomic watchdog likely would be critical in any deal.
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American sympathies in the Middle East have shifted dramatically toward the Palestinians, according to new Gallup polling, after decades of overwhelming support for the Israelis.
That shift accelerated during the war in Gaza. Three years ago, 54% of Americans sympathized more with the Israelis, compared to 31% for the Palestinians.
Now, their support is about evenly balanced, with 41% saying their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, and only 36% saying the same about the Israelis.
The numbers reflect how support for Israel has become deeply contentious in the U.S., with profound implications for American politics and foreign policy. The changing sentiment has been largely driven by Democrats, who are now much more likely to sympathize with Palestinians.
Gallup’s data indicates that the shift was already happening before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, then increased during Israel’s subsequent military operations in Gaza. The polling has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, meaning sentiment toward Israelis and Palestinians are roughly even.
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Students relax on the front steps of Low Memorial Library on the Columbia University campus, in New York City, Feb. 10, 2023. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File)
Federal immigration authorities arrested a Columbia University student early Thursday, triggering protests on campus and allegations that agents gained entry to the university-owned residence by posing as police officers searching for a missing child.
Just hours after detaining student Ellie Aghayeva, though, the federal government abruptly reversed course, permitting her to walk free after an apparent intervention by President Donald Trump.
In a social media post Thursday afternoon, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he expressed concerns about the arrest during an unrelated meeting with Trump, who then agreed to release her immediately.
“I am safe and okay,” Aghayeva wrote on Instagram, minutes after Mamdani’s post, adding she was in “complete shock” from the experience.
The head-spinning series of events marked the latest consequence of the unlikely relationship between the Republican president and Mamdani, a democratic socialist who Trump once threatened to have deported.
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Trump just can’t seem to choose among friends in the Texas Senate Republican primary.
So when he travels to the state on Friday, Trump will have all three candidates in the competitive race join him — just days before his party casts ballots in the primary race.
Sen. John Cornyn is battling for his fifth term and is being challenged by state Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt in a primary fight that has become viciously personal. And all three men, missing the coveted endorsement from Trump, have been trying to highlight their ties to him as they ramp up their campaigning ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
For his part, Trump will be seeking to ride the message of his State of the Union address from Tuesday, where he declared a return to economic prosperity and a more secure America — two centerpiece arguments for Republicans as they campaign to keep their congressional majorities.
Trump’s hesitation to endorse in the Texas Senate primary speaks to the tricky dynamics of the race.
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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told members of Congress on Thursday that she had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s or Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes, starting off two days of depositions that will also include former President Bill Clinton.
The depositions in the Clintons’ hometown of Chappaqua come after months of tense back-and-forth between the former high-powered Democratic couple and the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee as it investigates Epstein. It will be the first time that a former president has been forced to testify before Congress.
Yet the demand for a reckoning over Epstein’s abuse of underage girls has become a near-unstoppable force on Capitol Hill and beyond.
Trump, who has expressed regret that the Clintons are being forced to testify, bowed last year to pressure to release case files on Epstein. The Clintons, too, agreed to testify after their offers of sworn statements were rebuffed by the Oversight panel and its chairman, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., threatened criminal contempt of Congress charges against them.
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FILE - President Donald Trump holds up a tie designed with his face, worn by Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, as he exits the House chamber after delivering the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Feb. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
FILE - Former President Bill Clinton speaks in the Cash Room of the Treasury Department during an event for the anniversary of the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund,, Nov. 21, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
