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Clintons to be Deposed in House Oversight's Epstein Investigation; Dozens of FBI Records Missing from Epstein Files; Cuba Says Its Forces Killed Four in Gunfight With Florida Speedboat. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired February 26, 2026 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: This morning, Hillary Clinton deposed. A big day in the House investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, and then next up Bill Clinton. What are they -- what are the questions that this couple is about to face when even the committee chair has said that no one is accusing them of wrongdoing?

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Happening now, brink of action, the U.S. and Iran beginning a new round of negotiations. Will this be enough to prevent a U.S. attack? And what exactly does the Trump administration want from all this?

A brazen burglary right in the middle of traffic, suspects block a truck and then they run off with the goods inside.

Sara is out this morning. I'm John Berman with Kate Bolduan. This is CNN News Central.

BOLDUAN: Today, the Clintons will be in the hot seat and in the spotlight for the House investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Just think of this, the former secretary of state, the former first lady, and the former president of the United States, both about to be deposed by the House Oversight Committee. This is going to happen in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons live.

Hillary Clinton's deposition is first. Tomorrow, it's Bill Clinton's turn. This is not only a big moment for the committee that has been investigating, Jeffrey Epstein also marks a major reversal for the Clintons, who resisted, as we've been reporting on, they resisted testifying for months and only agreed to this after Republicans and Democrats threatened a contempt vote.

Hillary Clinton called for the testimony to be public, but instead it is happening behind closed doors. She has said she's never met Jeffrey Epstein. Her husband has. He flew on Epstein's private plane at least 16 times, according to a CNN review. And the two appear in multiple photos together that we've seen in the material released by the Justice Department.

The Republican committee chair has made clear that the Clintons are not accused of any wrongdoing here. James Comer saying that they just have a lot of questions.

CNN's Annie Grayer is live in Chappaqua this morning. Annie, what is about to happen?

ANNIE GRAYER, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Well, Kate, it is going to be a long day. We are expecting the deposition of Hillary Clinton to go for hours behind closed doors as she's going to be questioned by both Democrats and Republicans. Clinton is going to be accompanied by her legal team, who I'm told, has been preparing her for days to not only refresh her mind about what was happening in her life around the Epstein years, but also to plan lines of attack, because we know Republicans have a history of going after Hillary Clinton.

And I'm told that this deposition is going to have at least five categories of questions. Just to go through them, they are to discuss the alleged mismanagement of the federal government's investigation to Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, the circumstances and subsequent investigations of Epstein's 2019 death, the ways the federal government could effectively combat sex trafficking rings, how Epstein and Maxwell sought to curry favor to protect their illegal activities and potential violations of ethics rules related to elected officials.

Now, Kate, it has been a long road to get here. The Clintons did not want to testify and argued they had been unfairly singled out because other witnesses in this investigation were able to provide written statements. But House Oversight Chair James Comer wanted the Clintons to testify on his terms in person, and the Clintons only caved when the House Oversight Committee moved in a bipartisan way to hold them in criminal of contempt of Congress. It was only when that vote passed out of committee by both Democrats and Republicans that the Clintons agreed to in-person depositions that were going to be videotaped and transcribed.

We are here in Chappaqua because the committee and the Clinton attorneys agreed in an accommodation to have this in their hometown.

BOLDUAN: So, Annie, you laid out the topic areas that they've agreed to kind of keep the line of questioning within, but why do does the committee want to speak to Hillary Clinton when she says she's never even met Jeffrey Epstein?

GRAYER: That's right. Hillary Clinton says she's never met Jeffrey Epstein. She's only met Epstein's co-conspirator, Maxwell, a handful of times, and she argues that this is really just a political move by Republicans. Take a listen to what Hillary Clinton told the BBC just a few weeks ago.

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HILLARY CLINTON, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: You know, we have no links.

Why do they want to pull us into this? To divert attention from President Trump.

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This is not complicated. This is so obvious, and they keep trying to divert.

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GRAYER: So, that's Hillary Clinton's mindset heading into today. We are going to learn a lot more as this deposition kicks off at around 11:00 A.M. later this morning.

BOLDUAN: Annie Grayer kicking us off, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. John?

BERMAN: All right. With us now is CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig. Let's pick up right where Kate and Annie left off there, Elie. How sound is the argument for this committee to question Hillary Clinton about the Epstein investigation?

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Well, John, it is entirely unclear what information of substance and relevance the committee thinks they're going to get from Hillary Clinton as distinct from Bill Clinton. When it comes to Hillary Clinton, she claims, as you discussed before, that she's never met Jeffrey Epstein. There's no evidence to the contrary. She had very limited contact with Ghislaine Maxwell.

The most that James Comer, the representative Republican in charge of this committee, has ever alleged about Hillary Clinton is that in 2008, she hired the nephew of Ghislaine Maxwell to work on her presidential campaign, and then later at the Department of State. If that's all they've got, John, I don't know what they think they're going to get of any actual use out of Hillary Clinton.

Now, Bill Clinton, who's testifying tomorrow, absolutely a different story. He had an extensive relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. There are some photographs in the Epstein files that Bill Clinton will surely be presented with and have to answer questions about. But as for Hillary Clinton today, I really don't know what they're doing other than looking for a boldfaced name.

BERMAN: We've seen Hillary Clinton as a witness before. How would you assess her capabilities in that situation?

HONIG: Yes. She's not going to be cowed by this committee. I mean, going back to the 1990s, she was made to testify in the Paula Jones deposition in the civil lawsuit against her husband. She was made to testify in the grand jury by Ken Starr's prosecutor. She's testified many times as Secretary of State, most memorably in 2015 when she testified for 11 hours about Benghazi.

Hillary Clinton is going to be a very difficult subject for questioning. She's a lawyer. She knows what she's doing. She's not going to be intimidated by the moment, and I expect her to follow the advice that most lawyers would give someone in this situation, which is answer the question you're asked, but no less and no more. BERMAN: All right. Sticking on the Epstein files, but a very different subject here, CNN and others, NPR was one of the first to report it, that the Department of Justice did not release several documents that were journals of FBI interviews with a woman who says that she was sexually assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein and she told the FBI Donald Trump years and years and years and years and years ago.

Now, just because a witness says this obviously doesn't mean it's so, but these were documents as part of the larger Epstein files that were not released. The Department of Justice, when asked about this said, should any documents be found to have been improperly tagged in the review process and is responsive to the act, the department will, of course, publish it consistent with the law.

But, Elie, what do you think of the fact that DOJ did not release these, and do they have any possible justification for doing so?

HONIG: I've not seen any legitimate justification for withholding these documents. So, DOJ has said recently that if any documents are missing from this production, it's either because they're duplicates, they relate to an ongoing criminal investigation, or there's a privilege.

Okay, so let's take those three things. If they're duplicates, we would see the original. So, that's not the case. I highly doubt there's an ongoing criminal investigation by this Justice Department of Donald Trump. And so that just leaves privileges, but there are no privileges, legal privileges that would apply here. There's no attorney-client privilege. There's no Fifth Amendment privilege about things that a witness would've said about someone else.

Now, it could be that DOJ is relying on the principle that, well, we don't put out information that might be politically embarrassing or damaging to people who have not been charged with a crime. However, the Epstein Files Transparency Act specifically says that that's not an excuse, specifically says that DOJ cannot withhold documents on the basis of potential embarrassment or political damage to any person.

So, I think DOJ has not complied with the law here. And the question is, is some member of Congress or anyone else going to force them to measure up to the law?

BERMAN: Yes. And then the other question following that could very well be, why? Why in this case did they not comply with the law?

Elie Honig, great to see you this morning, thank you very much for this.

All right, four people killed on an alleged American-registered speedboat headed for Cuba armed with assault rifles, handguns, and Molotov cocktails. Cuba says they were trying to, quote, infiltrate the island.

What we are learning about the visit law enforcement made to Nancy Guthrie's home.

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And no good deed goes unpunished, a man shoveling the walkway for his building gets blasted by a wall of snow and ice from a snowplow. Frankly, this is part of the job description if you drive a snowplow, as far as I can tell, because it happens to be 100 percent of the time on plowing.

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BOLDUAN: So, the United States is promising now to find out what happened after Cuba's government says that Cuban border guard troops killed four people in a Florida-registered speedboat.

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The Cuban government is claiming that they were trying to, quote, infiltrate the island.

The boat was in Cuban territorial water when one person aboard allegedly shot at the Cuban forces first, and then they returned fire. A lot of questions, though.

CNN's Stefano Pozzebon joining me now with more on this. What are you picking up about this, because there's a lot of questions here?

STEFANO POZZEBON, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Indeed, Kate. Well, a lot of questions that still need to be answered around a very explosive situation or potentially explosive situation. It's not the first time Kate, that Cuban authorities take down boats or speedboats either trying to enter or flee their territory. However, of course, nothing is normal about Cuba this year, especially after the fall of Nicolas Maduro down in Venezuela.

The regime in Cuba is now on traveling in dire straits because of a dramatic economic and fuel crisis, frankly, with daily blackouts in the capital, Havana, and receiving enormous pressure from the United States who simply, and frankly put it, they want the Cubans and the Castro regime to get out of the door as quickly as possible.

U.S. authorities have called for an investigation. For example, the Florida attorney general has ordered his office to try to know more about what happened, because, as you said, we still don't really understand what exactly happened there, whether these people were indeed trying to enter the Cuban territory to foment an insurrection, as the Cubans are saying.

The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was somehow in the region yesterday. He was attending a summit of Caribbean nations in Saint Kitts, and this is what he said to say about the incident.

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MARCO RUBIO, SECRETARY OF STATE: Yes, I'm not going to speculate on what the U.S. will do or I'm going to. What I'm telling you is that we're going to find out exactly what happened and who was involved, and then we'll make a determination on the basis of what we find out, and we are going to find out, but we're not going to just take what somebody else tells.

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POZZEBON: And, Kate, by the way, these calls for further investigation are also coming from Democrats. For example, the mayor of Miami, Eileen Higgins, was told to our colleague, Audie Cornish, just about 20 minutes ago, that she also would like to know more about what happens, especially if these four people that have been killed had families in the Miami area.

Of course, this is a piece of news that will of course have a massive impact in the politics of South Florida, which is the home of the largest Cuban community outside of Havana. It's the home, of course, of the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and of other Republican lawmakers who are calling for the United States to take even tougher and tougher action against the government in Cuba.

We've only heard from the Castro regime. We've only heard from the Cuban government so far. We will know shortly whether the United States have arrived to further intelligence perhaps trying to understand why those ten people were traveling towards Cuba. We know that six more people have been apprehended by Cuban authorities. They're now receiving medical care after the incident. Two of them were previously known by Cuban authorities. They're all stand accused of terrorism. So, a very potentially explosive situation in an area of heightened tension in the Caribbean in this 2026. Kate?

BOLDUAN: That is for sure. Stefano, thank you very much, much more to come on this one ahead.

Also ahead for us, Bill Gates is now apologizing. What he is saying to the staff of his foundation over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein now.

And the list of nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are out. Rap icons, rock legends, pop divas, who's making the cut?

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BERMAN: New fallout this morning from the release of the Epstein files. The Wall Street Journal reports that billionaire Bill Gates apologized to staff at his foundation over his relationship with a convicted sex offender, calling it a mistake. The Microsoft co-founder is the latest high-profile figure facing intense scrutiny.

Let's get ready to CNN's Matt Egan with the latest on this. Good morning, sir.

MATT EGAN, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Good morning, John. This is the most detailed comments to date from Bill Gates about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. These comments came from a town hall with foundation staffers. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates, he did apologize, he said that he made a huge mistake to spend time with Epstein, to even involve foundation staffers with Epstein in meetings. Gates, he admitted to two affairs with Russian women, affairs that he says that Epstein later discovered. But the billionaire insists that the affairs did not involve Epstein's victims and that he never spent time with any of the victims.

According to the Journal, he said, I did nothing elicit. I saw nothing elicit. Now, during this town hall Gates says that he first met Epstein back in 2011, so around three years after Epstein's guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from a minor. He said that he did not properly check Epstein's background.

Now, Gates also acknowledged that his then wife, Melinda French Gates, she did express concerns about Epstein back in 2013. According to the Journal, Gates said, knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse in terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it's clear there was ongoing bad behavior. And then speaking of his ex-wife, he added, to give her credit, she was always kind of skeptical about the Epstein thing.

Now, Gates says that he never spent time at Epstein's Island.

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He never stayed overnight, but he said he did spend time with Epstein in Germany, in New York, in Washington, in France as well.

Now, is this a whole story from Gates? His critics would argue that maybe it's not, but we should note that Gates has not been accused of wrongdoing here. We have reached out to the Gates Foundation and they did confirm that he did have a town hall, that he did speak candidly, and that he did take responsibility for his actions. Of course, all of this only comes after the Justice Department was forced by Congress to release millions of Epstein related documents.

Now, take a listen to how Bill Gates talked about this during an interview earlier this month.

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BILL GATES, CO-FOUNDER, MICROSOFT: It just reminds me, you know, every minute I spent with him, I, I regret and I, you know, apologize that I did that.

It's actually true that I was only at dinners. You know, I never went to the island. I never met any women. And so, you know, the more that comes out, the more clear it'll be that although the time was a mistake, it had nothing to do with that kind of behavior.

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EGAN: Now, Gates is among the business leaders who are facing intense scrutiny over their ties to Epstein. We've seen a number of people be forced to apologize, forced to resign, forced to retire because of questions about their judgment for associating with Epstein. And there are those who believe, John, that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that more prominent people could be forced to take similar steps going forward.

GATES: We will see. Matt Egan, thank you for that update. I appreciate it.

What would it take for the U.S. not to attack Iran at this point? That might be the question. And the answer's unclear as a new round of negotiations between the new countries was underway.

And then a surge of new police activities surrounding the investigation and the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, what we are learning this morning.

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