Hillary Clinton says she answered every question in Epstein testimony and confirms Republican asked about UFOs and Pizzagate – as it happened

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back on Friday. Here are the latest developments:

• Zohran Mamdani, New York’s mayor, met again with Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss federal funding for a housing project, and persuaded the president to release a Columbia University student detained by ICE agents.

• Hillary Clinton said that, after she repeatedly told House Republicans she did not know Jeffrey Epstein, their questions 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 was propagated on the internet”.

• The Federal Aviation Administration closed the airspace in an area around Fort Hancock, Texas after congressional Democrats said a military laser-based anti-drone system accidentally shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone.

• Democratic leaders in the US Senate said they will also force a vote “in the coming days” on a war powers resolution to make sure any US participation in military action against Iran requires congressional authorization.

• Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, called on the justice department to explain why a photograph that appears to show Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, with Jeffrey Epstein, was removed from the public database of Epstein files.

Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, called on the justice department to explain why a photograph that appears to show Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, with Jeffrey Epstein, was removed from the public database of Epstein files.

“I’m sure there’s a good reason for this,” Massie, who co-wrote the law that requires the justice department to make public files from the federal investigations into Epstein wrote on social media. “DOJ needs to tell Congress who pulled this file down so we can ask them.”

The photograph, which could have been taken during Lutnick’s 2012 visit to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean with his family, is no longer on the justice department’s website but it remains available on Jmail, a mirroring archive of the files assembled in the form of a Gmail account.

Three House Democrats on committees that oversee the nation’s transportation and homeland security agencies said they were stunned by the news that the FAA had to close airspace in Texas again after two parts of the government once again failed to coordinate a laser strike on a suspected foreign drone.

“Our heads are exploding over the news that DoD reportedly shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone using a high risk counter-unmanned aircraft system, congressional Democrats Rick Larsen, André Carson and Bennie Thompson said in a statement.

“We said MONTHS ago that the White House’s decision to sidestep a bipartisan, tri-committee bill to appropriately train C-UAS operators and address the lack of coordination between the Pentagon, DHS and the FAA was a short-sighted idea,” they added. “Now, we’re seeing the result of its incompetence.”

The Federal Aviation Administration closed the airspace in an area around Fort Hancock, Texas on Thursday, after congressional aides told Reuters a military laser-based anti-drone system was believed to have accidentally shot down a US government drone.

The FAA and Pentagon did not immediately comment but the FAA cited “special security reasons” its notice about the restrictions on the airspace near the Mexican border on its NOTAM alert system, shorthand for “Notice to Air Missions”.

The airspace restriction around Fort Hancock took effect at 6:30pm local time on Thursday and remains in effect until 24 June, according to the notice.

Earlier this month, the FAA halted traffic at the airport in El Paso, Texas for about eight hours, after border protection agents reportedly used a laser-based anti-drone system on loan from the Pentagon to shoot down a party balloon.

Despite the fact that white South Africans are not suffering racial persecution, the Trump administration is preparing to act on the baseless conspiracy theory that they are and is making preparations to process 4,500 refugee applications every month from members of the Afrikaner ethnic minority that used to rule that nation through the repressive apartheid regime, according to a contracting document reviewed by Reuters.

Last year, Donald Trump falsely claimed that South Africa’s leaders were “taking away land, they’re confiscating land” from Afrikaners. The South African government says those claims are based on misinformation and there is no racism against Afrikaners and no land has been expropriated.

At the White House last May, Trump ambushed the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, by playing him a video that he falsely claimed proved genocide was being committed against white people under what he called “the opposite of apartheid”.

South Africa also denies US claims that Afrikaners are being targeted in racially motivated attacks in some rural communities. Instead, the South African government said Afrikaners – who are the descendants of Dutch and French colonial settlers – are “amongst the most economically privileged” in the country.

The contracting document Reuters discovered on a US government website on Wednesday said that the US is installing trailers on embassy property in Pretoria to support the effort.

The South African Chamber of Commerce in the US said last year that more than 67,000 people had expressed interest in relocating. Trump ordered a halt to refugee admissions into the US after taking office in 2025, but weeks later, he launched an effort to bring in white South Africans of Afrikaner ethnicity as refugees, insisting despite a lack of evidence that they had been violently persecuted in the majority-Black country.

The contracting document suggests the contract for the trailers was awarded without a competitive bidding process, citing an urgent need for a secure site. An immigration raid by South African authorities on a previous US refugee processing site on a commercial property in Johannesburg had forced the government to consider a more secure location, it said, after “operations were compromised.”

“The inability to safely process about 4,500 applicants per month, an objective communicated… from the White House, would result in failure to meet a Presidential priority,” the document said.

South African Foreign Ministry spokesperson Chrispin Phiri told Reuters his government would not interfere with the US program if it remained within legal boundaries, while reiterating Pretoria’s rejection of Trump’s claims about white South Africans. “The assertion that Afrikaners face systemic persecution is fundamentally unsubstantiated,” he said.

As the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper pointed out last year, several of the most influential voices around Trump “are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa”.

“Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons,” Kuper wrote.

One of those former white South Africans, Thiel, co-founded PayPal and went on to donate $10m to a group supporting the 2022 Senate campaign of his former employee, JD Vance, who is now Trump’s vice-president.

Anthropic said Thursday it “cannot in good conscience” comply with a demand from the Pentagon to remove safety precautions from its artificial intelligence model and grant the US military unfettered access to its AI capabilities.

The Department of Defense had threatened to cancel a $200m contract and deem Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a designation with serious financial implications, if the company did not comply with the request by Friday.

Chief executive Dario Amodei said in a statement that the threats from the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, would not change the company’s position, and that he hoped Hegseth would “reconsider”.

“Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters – with our two requested safeguards in place,” he said. “We remain ready to continue our work to support the national security of the United States.”

At the core of the Department of Defense and Anthropic’s standoff is a disagreement over how the AI company will permit its product, Claude, to be used. The Pentagon has demanded that Anthropic turn off safety guardrails and allow any lawful use of Claude, while Anthropic has pushed back against allowing Claude to be used for mass domestic surveillance or in autonomous weapons systems that can kill people without human input.

After months of dispute and pressure from the government, Hegseth reportedly gave Amodei until Friday evening to agree to the Pentagon’s demands or face punitive action.

Three memos that describe four interviews conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2019 contain explicit but unsubstantiated claims that Donald Trump sexually abused a woman when she was a minor in the early 1980s with the assistance of Jeffrey Epstein, according to a Guardian review of those documents.

The Department of Justice did not release those records when it uploaded millions of pages of files related to Epstein beginning in December. The existence of the missing documents was first reported by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and subsequently confirmed by NPR, causing outrage in Washington and sparking an investigation from congressional Democrats.

The Guardian obtained the missing FBI form 302 reports, which memorialize 25 pages of agents’ notes from the four interviews conducted in the summer and fall of 2019. The notes describe how the woman came forward to tell agents she recognized Epstein from a photo sent by a childhood friend. Only the first session, in which she did not name Trump, made it into the public release. The Guardian has chosen not to publish the woman’s name.

Her allegations have not been verified, and the FBI never brought charges related to her claims, which at times appear outlandish. Her statements also contradict what is known about Epstein’s life in the early 1980s. The millions of investigative documents released by the DoJ have contained explosive allegations that have led to resignations and arrests, but also specious claims that have later proven false. Trump has consistently denied wrongdoing related to Epstein, and said last week: “I did nothing.”

After her deposition on Thursday, Hillary Clinton confirmed reports that, after she repeatedly told House Republicans that she did not know Jeffrey Epstein, their questions 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 was propagated on the internet, that was serving as the basis of a member’s questions to me.”

Pizzagate was a 2016 conspiracy theory based on the false claim that members of Clinton’s campaign team had communicated in coded emails about child sex slaves held in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington DC pizza restaurant that has no basement and no involvement in child sex-trafficking. The conspiracy theory was promoted by far-right Trump supporters, including Jack Posobiec, until late 2016 when a man with an assault rifle who believed that it was true stormed into the pizzeria to “self-investigate” and fired a shot from an assault rifle.

Speaking to reporters after her deposition by the House oversight committee, Hillary Clinton just said that she is confident that her husband, the former president Bill Clinton, knew nothing about the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.

Asked by a reporter how she was preparing for her husband’s testimony, and if she was “a hundred percent confident” that Bill Clinton was unaware of Epstein’s crimes when he spent time with him before the late sex offender’s first arrest, Clinton responded:

“I am, and I think the chronology of the connection that he had with Epsty- Epstein ended years, several years before anything about Epstein’s criminal activities came to light, and that he was charged and, sadly, given a sweetheart deal”, Clinton said, catching herself as she initially started to mispronounce Epstein’s name.

Clinton went on to criticize the deal offered to Epstein in 2007 by federal prosecutors in Florida, which enabled him to plead guilty to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008 and serve a short sentence in exchange for dropping more serious federal charges.

“Had that not happened, perhaps his predatory behavior could have been stopped earlier,” she added. “But I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of people who had contact with him before his criminal plea in ‘08 were like most people, they did not know what he was doing. And I think that is exactly what my husband will testify to tomorrow.

Bill Clinton, who gives testimony on Friday, has previously denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and said that he had no contact with the late sex offender after his first arrest in 2006.

In a televised statement to reporters after her testimony behind closed doors to the House oversight committee, Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, US senator and secretary of state, said: “I answered every one of their questions.”

She went on to reiterate what she said in her opening statement to the panel: “I never met Jeffrey Epstein, never had any connection or communication with him. I knew Ghislaine Maxwell casually, as an acquaintance.”

“It was disappointing that they refused to hold a public hearing,” Clinton added.

She also pointed to what she said was the partisan nature of the questions from the Republicans on the panel.

“I can only say that the best exchange that I had came at the very end, when contrary to every other deposition they have taken, no Republican member asked any question about Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell to anyone else they have deposed,” Clinton said.

“And in fact, the Republican members didn’t even show up for the deposition of Les Wexner,” she continued. “And when I said that, I had to point out that the only questions that any Republican member asked, of any of the people they deposed, was or former attorney general Bill Barr, when chairman Comer asked him about the allegations, in his view, about Russia’s involvement in my election in 2016,” she said, referring to a conspiracy theory that Clinton, not Donald Trump, was aided by Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election she lost.

“So at the very end of this hearing, after I made that point, I want to commend chairman Comer for raising a series of significant questions that I responded to about the nature of the investigation, in the areas that I thought should be explored,” she said.

“So I appreciated that, I want to see the truth come out,” Clinton said.

After Hillary Clinton told House Republicans in a deposition about Jeffrey Epstein that she never met Jeffrey Epstein, and knew nothing about his crimes or those of Ghislaine Maxwell they reportedly asked her about two very different subjects, UFOs and the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory.

Annie Karni, a New York Times congressional correspondent, reported the questions about Pizzagate, a 2016 conspiracy theory based on the false claim that members of Clinton’s campaign team were communicating in coded emails about child sex slaves held in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington DC pizza restaurant that has no basement. The conspiracy theory was promoted by far-right influencers, including Jack Posobiec, until late 2016 when a man with an assault rifle who believed that it was true stormed into the pizzeria to “self-investigate” and fired a shot from an assault rifle.

A source confirmed the questions about UFOs to Matt Berg, Crooked Media’s Washington correspondent. “They are not serious people,” Berg’s unnamed source said.

Melanie Stansbury, a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico, expressed surprise about the UFO questions on social media. “If these guys were serious about addressing the Epstein crimes, why are they not asking the AG and FBI to answer for the cover-up of files and why cases have been left unprosecuted for decades?” she asked.

Zohran Mamdani’s spokesperson, Joe Calvello, just provided the Guardian with details on the mayor’s meeting with Donald Trump.

He noted that Mamdani presented the president about a possible project in New York City that would “deliver one of the biggest federal investments in housing in 50 years”.

Calvello added that “the mayor proposed a project with an estimated 12,000 units, and our team did mock up front pages of newspapers, and the mayor presented those to the president in the meeting”. Calvello added that Trump appeared “enthusiastic” about the idea.

In addition to housing, Mamdani’s spokesperson said the mayor also brought up the detainment of the Columbia student, Ellie Aghayeva, who was detained this morning. Mamdani “asked the president directly that she be released” according to Calvello. “He handed a list of four additional students who had been detained in New York City to the chief of staff and to the president, asking them to also consider dismissing their cases,” Calvello added. “Shortly after the meeting, president Trump then called the mayor to let him know the Columbia student detained this morning will be released from detention.”

As our colleagues Alice Speri and Sara Braun report, Aghayeva has now been released.

Democratic leaders in the US Senate said they will also force a vote “in the coming days” on a war powers resolution to make sure any US participation in military action against Iran requires congressional authorization.

The resolution “would not prevent the U.S. from defending itself or Israel from an Iranian attack,” the Democratic officials said.

A similar resolution received a vote in the senate last June, which gained bipartisan support but not enough votes to advance in the legislative process.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement:

“Donald Trump must make the case to Congress and the American people on what the objectives or strategy would be for any potential military campaign against Iran. The American people deserve to know the why and the how of any planned action against Iran before we risk the lives of our sons and daughters. Iran’s ongoing campaign of terrorism, regional destruction and oppression of the Iranian people must be met with a coherent strategy built on strength and clarity. This resolution ensures this administration cannot sleepwalk this country into an endless and costly war. It is vital that Congress stand up for its constitutional duty.”

Amid widespread speculation that something seemed a bit off about the oddly filtered image of New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, meeting a former Queens resident, Donald Trump, in the Oval Office on Thursday, the mayor’s communications director has confirmed that the image is real.

Mamdani’s spokesperson, Anna Bahr, a former aide to Bernie Sanders aide who traveled to Washington DC with the mayor, responded to social media commentary attributing the heavy use of the Instagram-style filter to her millennial boss by saying that it was, in fact, a “White House photo”.

The mayor’s office also confirmed directly to the Guardian that the photo was genuine.

Another Mamdani spokesperson, Joe Calvello, told reporters that the mayor’s office brought Trump the two newspaper front pages seen in the photo: one with the headline with “Ford To City: Drop Dead”, which is a print-out of a real 1975 cover of New York’s Daily News, when then president Gerald Ford refused to bail out the city; the second, a mock-up of an imaginary Daily News cover that read: “Trump To City: Let’s Build”.

Calvello also said that the meeting on Thursday stemmed from the first one between the two men, when they agreed that the mayor would return when he identified a building project they could collaborate on.

Mamdani proposed a project that would create an estimated 12,000 units of new housing with federal support, Calvello said, a figure which was referenced in the mocked-up newspaper cover.