The conspiracy to free the world's most notorious sex traffickerQAnon is fake. But Trump's corrupt deal with Ghislaine Maxwell is real.
Ghislaine Maxwell has one card to play, and she’s playing it well. The convicted sex trafficker knows that there is just one way out of a cell in Tallahassee, and she is dancing hard for that golden key. Maxwell needs a presidential pardon if she wants to see the outside of a prison before she’s 75, and so she’s hawking her wares all over DC, promising the White House and Congress that what she’s got will blow their minds. Of course, this is the same person whose “willingness to brazenly lie under oath about her conduct, including some of the conduct charged in the Indictment, strongly suggest[s] her true motive has been and remains to avoid being held accountable for her crimes” — at least according to the Justice Department. So, YMMV. In the meantime President Trump seems intent on using the flame he lit by feeding his base conspiracy theories about Epstein to light himself on fire. Just yesterday he rolled out a new explanation for his break up with the notorious pedophile. This time he says he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for poaching staff.  Trump: People were taken out of the spa, hired by Epstein… I told him we don’t want you taking our people, whether it’s spa or not spa. He did it again, I said out of here. Reporter: Was one of the stolen people Virginia Giuffre? Trump: I think so. He stole her.  Tue, 29 Jul 2025 18:24:59 GMT View on BlueskyJeffrey Epstein did not “steal” Virginia Giuffre — she was a 14-year-old girl, not a vassal on Trump’s estate. Giuffre was working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 when Maxwell picked her up and hired her as a “traveling masseuse.” And in any event, his timing doesn’t line up at all. As law Professor Ryan Goodman points out, two years later the bromance was still going strong, with Trump guffawing to New York Magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy … a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” But Giuffre wasn’t laughing. She spent five years being abused by Maxwell and Epstein, and appears to have been haunted by the experience for the rest of her short life. She died by suicide just three months ago.
Multiple women testified that they were groomed and exploited by Maxwell for Epstein’s gratification. And in 2022, a jury convicted her of sex trafficking a minor, transporting a minor across state lines for criminal sexual activity, and three conspiracy charges related to grooming and transporting minors. Maxwell has never shown an iota of remorse, and has consistently denied her role in the exploitation scheme. All of which makes it exceptionally inappropriate, not to mention cruel, for the Justice Department to be cozying up to her and potentially rewarding her conduct. Todd Blanche goes to TallahasseeOn July 22, Deputy Attorney Todd Blanche tweeted that he was heading into the lion’s den: “Justice demands courage. For the first time, the Department of Justice is reaching out to Ghislaine Maxwell to ask: what do you know?” It is not normal for prosecutors to keep the public updated on criminal investigations via social media. But Blanche’s boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, congratulated herself on the righteousness of their cause. “If Ghislane Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say,” she tweeted magnanimously. She did not explain why she and Blanche weren’t directing their inquiries to the victims themselves. But posting through it was only the beginning of the wild impropriety. Blanche reportedly spent nine hours huddled up with Maxwell and her lawyer David Oscar Markus and no one else. In normal circumstances, an experienced prosecutor would conduct a high-stakes interview in the presence of a law enforcement agent to act as a witness. If the interviewee later changes her story, someone needs to be able to testify about what was actually said during the proffer session — and that someone cannot be the lawyer. Moreover, Blanche has minimal ability to assess Maxwell’s credibility in the context of the interview — something that’s critical when the subject is a prolific liar who was already indicted for perjury. The Maxwell and Epstein case files run to hundreds of thousands of pages, including hundreds of witness interviews. It’s not something he could familiarize himself with on the flight from Dulles to Tallahassee! There was a lawyer in the Justice Department who had the granular facility with the documents because she prosecuted Maxwell and prepared the indictment of Epstein. And that lawyer was Maurene Comey, daughter of former FBI director James Comey, who was fired as head of the Violent and Organized Crime Unit at the Southern District of New York two weeks ago. But that conveniently-timed termination does not explain why the second in command at the DOJ is personally conducting jailhouse interviews, something many levels below his pay grade. All of which suggests that the DOJ isn’t really interested in a written immunity agreement, to the extent that such an agreement is even feasible. Under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 35, modifications more than one year after a sentence is imposed can only be awarded for new information, or for information whose usefulness was unknown at the time of sentencing. Maxwell has no new information, and she could have tried to make a deal six years ago when Epstein was alive, or even three years ago when she was sentenced. It seems quite improbable that Judge Paul Engelmeyer, who took over the case when Judge Alison Nathan got elevated to the Second Circuit, would accept a plea deal under these circumstances. And so it seems most likely that this exercise is preparatory to a pardon or commutation, if Maxwell can offer Trump something he actually wants. Presumably this does not include confirmation that he really did draw and crude figure of a nude woman with a bizarre birthday message for Epstein’s 50th. Torpedoing Trump’s (doomed) SLAPP suit against Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal is not the kind of assistance that unlocks jail cells. No, Trump has made it clear that the quid for his quo is dirt on prominent Democrats.  Trump on Epstein: "You should focus on Clinton. You should focus on the president of Harvard. The former president of Harvard. You should focus on some of the hedge fund guys. I'll give you a list. These guys lived with Jeffrey Epstein. I sure as hell didn't."  Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:04:04 GMT View on BlueskyAnd so if Maxwell wants out, she better start singing about blue birds only. Bipartisan posturingOver in Congress, the vibes are no less rancid. House Oversight Chair James Comer subpoenaed Maxwell and announced his intention to take staff to interview her on August 11. Markus, Maxwell’s attorney, told reporters outside the jail that his client “was asked about maybe about 100 different people” by Blanche and “answered every single question asked of her.” But it’s one thing to horse trade with the president’s henchman under an explicit grant of immunity. It’s quite another to testify to a bunch of spluttering street fighters looking to score public goals. And so Markus, who is a hell of a good lawyer, sought to leverage Congress against the White House. “Ms. Maxwell cannot risk further criminal exposure in a politically charged environment without formal immunity,” he wrote in a letter to Comer on Tuesday. “Nor is a prison setting conducive to eliciting truthful and complete testimony.” (Presumably this was not a comment on the veracity of his client’s jailhouse proffer to Blanche just last week.)
Markus went on to say that Maxwell would require Congress’s questions in advance, so as to provide her adequate time to inspect the voluminous record and jog her memory of long-ago events. (Cough.) But then he came to the real point.
If only Donald Trump would see fit to pardon her for all her crimes, then she would of course be delighted to discuss them live on C-SPAN. Name the date, Mister Congressman! The prospect of someone who spent a lot of time with the president three decades ago being asked about it on live TV was somehow not appealing to House Republicans, who just fled DC rather than let Democrats vote on any motion that referred to Maxwell and Epstein.
And so the GOP gratefully lobbed the hot potato back to the White House, for Blanche and Bondi to work their magic. Prepping the baseAs Media Matters flagged, Fox News’s weird hill cousin Newsmax is already executing a pivot to portraying Maxwell as a victim. “She just might be a victim. She just might be. There was a rush to judgment. There was a lot of chaos there for a while,” Trump pal Greg Kelly said the other night, adding that “she deserves to be out. And maybe she never deserved to be in there in the first place.” Taking their cues from the White House, right-wing media has begun to depict the “Epstein files,” which contain multiple references to Trump himself, as tainted by association with the Biden administration. No matter that Epstein was indicted in 2019 when Trump was in the White House. The evidence was in the custody of the Deep State for four years, and who knows what could have been planted during that time!  Last week Q: Did Bondi tell you your name appeared in the Epstein files? Trump: No, no. These files were made up by Comey, Obama, made up by Biden  Wed, 23 Jul 2025 19:47:52 GMT View on BlueskyFrom there it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to saying the entire prosecution was a stitch up by Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Merrick Garland. And House Speaker Mike Johnson seems to have resigned himself to that already. “Well, I mean, obviously that’s a decision of the president,” he said last weekend on Meet the Press. “I won’t get in front of him. That’s not my lane.” Pardon for notorious child sex trafficker incoming in 3 … 2 … |
