Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next couple of hours. We begin with the news that the former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has accused president Donald Trump of orchestrating a “cover-up” over files related to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to an interview with the BBC published on Monday.“Get the files out. They are slow-walking it,” Clinton, who is due to testify before a Congressional committee on the issue, told the British broadcaster in an interview in Berlin. The Justice Department last month released the latest cache of so-called Epstein files – more than 3m documents, photos and videos related to its investigation into Epstein, who died from what was determined to be suicide while in custody in 2019. Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, features regularly in the files, but no evidence has come to light implicating either Clinton in criminal activity, AFP reported. The couple has been ordered to give closed-door depositions before the House oversight committee, which is investigating Epstein’s connections to powerful figures and how information about his crimes was handled.“We will show up but we think it would be better to have it in public,” Hillary Clinton told the BBC.
