Ghislaine Maxwell is a pedophile, a sex trafficker and a perjurer, and Donald Trump needs her to vouch for him.
In an act of witness tampering as reality TV, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche raced to Florida to meet with Maxwell on Thursday, before she could speak to congressional investigators pursuant to a subpoena.
Never before has a deputy AG met with a convicted felon under these circumstances. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for luring underage girls for Trump’s former best friend Jeffrey Epstein. Two victims testified at her trial that she sexually abused them from the age of 14.
Blanche is Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer and AG Pam Bondi worked on his impeachment case. Trump squashed the long-promised release of the Epstein files after Bondi and Blanche warned him his name appeared in the files. Trump denied being told he was in the files, but Justice Department officials now admit they briefed him. Now, Alan Dershowitz, who represented both Trump and Epstein, is practically begging Trump to make a deal with Maxwell.
The Maxwell gambit exemplifies Trump’s erratic and self-defeating approach to the metastasizing scandal. The Maxwell arc will keep everyone riveted on a story that he’s desperately trying to kill. Will Maxwell vouch for Trump? Will Trump pardon the only person doing time for the Epstein atrocities?
Maxwell probably would have helped Trump even without a sensational meeting. The two are old friends, after all. Trump even said he wished her well. More importantly, Maxwell is a sophisticated criminal who knows Trump holds the power to pardon her, commute her sentence, or simply make her life more comfortable in federal prison. Now that Trump has made a big show of dispatching his deputy AG for a private audience, nobody will take Maxwell seriously if she swears Epstein’s notorious 50th birthday book is a figment of the Wall Street Journal’s imagination.
It was Maxwell who compiled the infamous 50th birthday album in which Trump allegedly wrote a raunchy note to Epstein in the silhouette of a naked woman with his famously spiky signature doing double duty as the pubes: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
In addition to testimony before Congress, Maxwell’s testimony could figure prominently in the $10 billion lawsuit that Trump filed against the Wall Street Journal for defamation. Bradley Edwards, a lawyer who has represented over 200 Epstein victims, says the Epstein estate has the book and that Congress could easily obtain it. Critically, Edwards said some of his clients helped to assemble the scrapbook, so we don’t have to take Maxwell’s word about how it came together.
Maxwell is not a credible witness. In addition to the sex crimes, she was charged with perjury for lying about what she knew about Epstein’s crimes in a 2016 lawsuit. "In short, the defendant decides when she wishes to disclose facts to the Court, and those facts shift when it serves the defendant's interests," prosecutors wrote in her sentencing memo.
In the course of her criminal trial and countless lawsuits, Maxwell has locked herself into the story that she didn’t know what Epstein was up to. So it would look suspicious if she suddenly claimed to know salacious details about Trump’s political enemies. The more details Maxwell offered up, the guiltier she’d look, and the more politically costly it would be for Trump to pardon her.
Nevertheless, Trump is notorious for abusing the Justice Department’s vast powers. He used his purported Article II Powers to fire the prosecutor who put Maxwell behind bars. His Justice Department extended a quid pro quo to New York mayor Eric Adams, offering to dismiss his federal bribery case if he supported the administration’s brutal immigration policies. Trump rewarded the January 6th insurrectionists with pardons on his first day in office. Pam Bondi even tried to mollify the lunatic base by dismissing charges against a doctor who destroyed covid vaccines, tricked his child patients, and forged vaccination cards to cover his tracks.
The news that Trump killed the release of the Epstein files after learning he was in them and lied about doing so has moved this scandal to the realm of a coverup. Trump spent years chasing girls with Epstein and the files may prove embarrassing even if they are not incriminating. Whether or not the Epstein files hold evidence of wrongdoing by Trump, he promised to release the files and then reneged to protect himself. Then he lied about knowing he was in the files. Todd Blanche’s hurried trip to Florida to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell should raise further alarm that Donald Trump is once again perverting the course of justice.
Donald Trump is not going to beat the pedophilia suspicions by calling in a favor from the nation’s most notorious living pedophile.