Berlin, Germany , 17 February (H.S.): Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lambasted President Donald Trump's administration on Tuesday, February 17, 2026, during a BBC interview at the annual World Forum here, accusing it of orchestrating a deliberate cover-up by slow-walking the release of Jeffrey Epstein files mandated under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Get the files out. They are slow-walking it, Clinton avowed, impugning the Department of Justice's purported reticence despite its divulgation earlier this month of millions of pages—including 2,000 videos and 180,000 images—aggregating nearly 3.5 million documents chronicling probes into the financier's sex trafficking empire, which precipitated his 2019 custodial demise adjudged suicidal following a 2008 Florida plea on minor solicitation.

Kentucky Republican Representative Thomas Massie, the Act's co-author, echoed disquietude, exhorting the DoJ to exhume internal memoranda delineating antecedent prosecutorial reticences vis-à-vis Epstein and confederates.

The White House parried with alacrity, vaunting its liberations as exceeding Democratic solicitude for victims, inclusive of House Oversight Committee subpoena compliance and Trump's adjurations for inquests into Epstein's Democrat friends, whilst the DoJ deprecated sundry Trump-adjacent imputations therein as unfounded and false electioneering phantoms bereft of juridical traction.

Queried on Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's amenability to Oversight Committee summons—amid transatlantic hectoring from U.S. solons and the late Virginia Giuffre's kin—Clinton decreed, I think everyone should testify who is asked to testify, elucidating that mere filiation evinces no turpitude, as Andrew persists in disavowal post his 2022 no-liability settlement with Giuffre, who perished by suicide in 2025.

The Clintons, slated for Oversight deposition—Bill on February 27, Hillary antecedently—averted contempt strictures via acquiescence, portending the first ex-presidential congressional testimony since Gerald Ford's 1983 antecedent; they petition a public forum, with Hillary insisting, We have nothing to hide... sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Bill Clinton, manifoldly invoked in the archives sans survivor imputations of malfeasance—professing Epstein dissociation two decades past—joins Hillary, who conceded punctilious Maxwell encounters sans deeper implication, in decrying partisan diversion from Trump's copious file cameos, whom neither faces victim arraignments despite erstwhile fraternities sundered mid-aughts.

Republican chair James Comer stigmatized their compliance as capitulation afore contempt's imminence, eliciting Clinton's plea for equitableness: I just want everybody treated the same way, whilst positing the duo as shiny objects obfuscating Trumpian exposure.

This imbroglio, amid cascading elite reverberations—from Goldman Sachs to Harvard—heralds an inexorable forensic denouement, pitting transparency sinews against political carapaces in the Epstein saga's interminable dénouement.

Hindusthan Samachar / Jun Sarkar