Ghislaine Maxwell said that she never saw Donald Trump do anything that would cause concern, during her hours-long meetings with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche over the Jeffrey Epstein case, according to ABC News.
The Trump administration is considering whether to release the transcript from Blanche’s meetings with Maxwell last month, ABC News reported. CNN first reported that the meeting was recorded and is being digitized.
The White House has been trying to contain fallout from the so-called “Epstein Files” for weeks after a Justice Department memo concluded there were no more significant disclosures to be made in the case. Vice President JD Vance is holding a strategy meeting with other top officials Wednesday evening to work on their handling of the Epstein case, CNN reported.
Amid calls for increased transparency from across the political spectrum, Blanche met with Maxwell at a Florida courthouse for two days in July.
Maxwell, 63, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in a sex trafficking scheme to abuse girls with Epstein. Her attorneys have taken an appeal of her conviction to the Supreme Court.
“She was asked about maybe about 100 different people. She answered questions about everybody and she didn't hold anything back,” her attorney David Oskar Markus said of her meetings with Blanche. “She never invoked a privilege. She never refused to answer a question. So we’re very proud of her.”
Blanche met with Maxwell in Tallahassee, Florida, where she was being held in federal prison. Earlier this week, she was moved to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas.
The president was asked Tuesday if he had personally approved Maxwell’s transfer. “I didn’t know about it at all. I read about it just like you did,” he said. “It’s not a very uncommon thing.”
Trump and Epstein were friendly in the 1990s and early 2000s and were seen together at parties in Palm Beach and New York.
Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy" in a 2002 New York Magazine article, and flight records show that he flew on the financier's private jet.
Their friendship dissolved around the mid-2000s. After Epstein's arrest on sex trafficking charges in 2019, the president told reporters he hadn't spoken to him in 15 years. A Mar-a-Lago member told the Miami Herald that Trump had Epstein kicked out in 2007 after the financier "harassed the daughter of a member.”
The president has repeatedly called Epstein a "creep." Last week, Trump revealed that he had ended his friendship with Epstein after he “stole” young female employees from his private club.
Trump has never been formally accused of wrongdoing or charged with any crime in connection with the Epstein case.
To try to quell the uproar over the Epstein Files, the president directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to release “any and all pertinent” grand jury transcripts from the Maxwell and Epstein criminal cases. Bondi filed requests with the courts to release the transcripts, which are under seal. Experts say these documents only make up a small portion of the files related to the investigations.
Maxwell, however, is opposed to unsealing the grand jury transcripts.
With her petition pending before the Supreme Court, her lawyers argued that releasing the raw transcripts would “inevitably influence any future legal proceeding” and cause “severe and irrevocable” reputational harm. Maxwell has never been allowed to review the documents, they said in a Tuesday memo to the court.
The judges overseeing the cases previously asked the government to address legal questions before they can consider releasing them.
On Monday, the DOJ gave the judges annotated versions of the transcripts, identifying what information is not publicly available. However in an attached memo, Bondi admitted that “much” of the information in the transcripts is already in the public domain.
“The enclosed, annotated transcripts show that much of the information provided during the course of the grand jury testimony—with the exception of the identities of certain victims and witnesses—was made publicly available at trial or has otherwise been publicly reported through the public statements of victims and witnesses,” Bondi wrote.
The attorney general also noted that the government has provided notice about its requests to unseal transcripts to all but one of the victims referenced in the documents. “The Government still has been unable to contact that remaining victim,” she wrote.
Annie Farmer, a survivor of Epstein who testified at Maxwell’s trial, voiced her support for unsealing the transcripts — with redactions to protect victims’ information — in a letter to the judges overseeing the New York cases.
"Given the magnitude and abhorrence of Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes, unsealing the grand jury transcripts is not just appropriate, it is necessary to understand the full scope of the abuse and those who enabled it,” Farmer’s attorneys wrote in a Tuesday filing.
Farmer called the DOJ’s decision not to investigate uncharged third parties in connection with Epstein as “a cowardly abdication of its duties to protect and serve.”
Two other Epstein survivors criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the case earlier this week. The victims remained anonymous and filed their letters in the New York case related to the late sex offender.
“The latest attention on the ‘Epstein Files’, the ‘Client List’ is OUT OF CONTROL and the ones that are left to suffer are not the high-profile individuals, IT IS THE VICTIMS. Why the lack of concern in handling such sensitive information for the victims sake?” one wrote in a Monday filing.
Another wrote: “Dear United States, I wish you would have handled and would handle the whole ‘Epstein Files’ with more respect towards and for the victims. I am not some pawn in your political warfare.”
The administration’s handling of the case has been under heightened scrutiny since the Justice Department released its July 6 Epstein memo, in which the DOJ confirmed that Epstein died by suicide and stated there was no evidence to support the existence of a “client list” of high-profile individuals involved in his alleged sex trafficking.
The memo put to an end months-long anticipation for new information in the Epstein case. In February, Bondi had released “Phase 1” of the files, a tranche of documents that included mostly publicly available information. She also suggested that the “client list”was sitting on her desk.
Parts of Trump’s MAGA base and prominent lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for heightened transparency around the Epstein files.
Those calls grew louder after the Wall Street Journal published a report last month claiming that the president drew a sexually suggestive 50th birthday card for Epstein in 2003. Trump has vehemently denied making the card and sued the Journal in a $10 billion defamation case.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that DOJ officials told the president in May that his name, among many others, had appeared in the Epstein Files. Being named in the files does not suggest any wrongdoing.
The president’s name was reportedly redacted from documents as the administration prepared for their potential public release, Bloomberg reported last week.
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