A House member leaks a deposition photo to a commentator, pausing the Clinton testimony.

The Oversight Committee’s deposition of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in connection with the committee’s investigation of the late Jeffrey Epstein, was held in Chappaqua, New York, in the home of the witness, on Thursday. The deposition was, by procedural rule, closed-door. It was transcribed. It was filmed. It ran seven hours.

Early in the proceedings, the deposition was briefly paused after a Republican member of the committee, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, was reported to have passed a photograph of the closed-door proceedings to a right-wing commentator, Benny Johnson, who posted it. The pause was on the public record. The leak was on the public record. The committee chair, Representative James Comer, was forced to address the matter publicly.

The substance of Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, by the committee’s own readout, was that she did not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein, that she had never flown on his plane, that she had never been to his island home, and that she knew Ms. Maxwell only casually, as an acquaintance. She said she had answered the committee’s questions as fully as she could. She added, in passing, that toward the end of the deposition the questioning had grown “quite unusual” and turned to UFOs and to Pizzagate, the bogus conspiracy theory propagated on the internet during the 2016 election cycle.

The committee, during the seven-hour deposition, asked the witness about UFOs.

This is the procedural posture of an investigation: a closed-door deposition of a former Secretary of State, in her home, by members of Congress, at least one of whom violated the committee’s leak protocols within the first hour, on a docket that, in the seventh hour, addressed UFOs.

There is, in the standard committee-investigation literature, a description of what these proceedings are for. The description involves the elicitation of factual testimony from witnesses with relevant knowledge, on a record, for the purposes of legislative oversight. The investigation of the late Jeffrey Epstein, on a record now stretching across multiple committees and multiple administrations, has not produced legislation. The investigation has produced depositions. The depositions have produced photographs. The photographs are, by the time the depositions end, on the timeline of a commentator with several million followers.

The witness, on the way out, told a press scrum that she considered the hearing “partisan political theater” and noted, on the record, that no member of the committee had asked her about the relationship between Mr. Epstein and the President. The President, on the public record, has been photographed with Mr. Epstein on multiple occasions. Mrs. Clinton’s observation of this absence is, in the day’s reporting, the part the committee will not return to in its public statements.

Calmly documenting the decline.