(AFP) – A top US Justice Department official spent hours on Thursday grilling Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned accomplice of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as President Donald Trump struggles to tamp down a furor over his handling of the explosive case. David Markus, Maxwell’s attorney, said the former British socialite answered every question she was asked during a day-long meeting at a courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida.
“She never invoked a privilege. She never declined to answer,” Markus told reporters. “She answered all the questions truthfully, honestly, and to the best of her ability.” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said he would continue interviewing Maxwell on Friday and “share additional information about what we learned at the appropriate time.” Markus said he was not going to comment on the “substance” of the meeting with Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer for his hush money trial and two federal criminal cases.
Maxwell, 63, is serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted in 2021 of recruiting underage girls for Epstein, who died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial in his own sex trafficking case. Earlier this week, Blanche said if Maxwell has “information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.” “No one is above the law — and no lead is off-limits,” he said.
Trump, 79, was once a close friend of Epstein and The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the president’s name was among hundreds found during a DOJ review of the so-called “Epstein files,” though there has not been evidence of wrongdoing. Trump filed a $10 billion defamation suit against the Journal last week after it reported that he had penned a sexually suggestive letter to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003. Maxwell is the only former Epstein associate convicted in connection with his activities, which right-wing conspiracy theorists allege included trafficking young models for VIPs.
The meeting with Maxwell marks another attempt by the Trump administration to defuse anger among the Republican president’s supporters over what they have long seen as a cover-up of sex crimes by Epstein, who was a wealthy financier with high-level connections.
– ‘Corrupt deal’ –
Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said the meeting between Maxwell and a Justice Department official who used to be Trump’s own lawyer smacks of a “corrupt deal so that she can exonerate Donald Trump.” Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said it raises a number of troubling questions.
“Is he really going as (deputy attorney general) or is he going de facto as Trump’s personal criminal attorney, Tom Hagen style?” the senator said in a reference to the Corleone family lawyer in “The Godfather.” “Will he promise her a pardon for silence, or for a Trump-friendly tale?” Whitehouse asked. Many of the president’s core supporters want more transparency on the Epstein case, and Trump had promised to deliver that on retaking the White House in January.
But he has since dismissed the controversy as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” and the DOJ and FBI released a memo this month claiming the Epstein files did not contain evidence that would justify further investigation. Epstein committed suicide while in jail and was not murdered, did not blackmail any prominent figures, and did not keep a “client list,” according to the July 7 FBI-DOJ memo.
Seeking to redirect public attention, the White House has promoted unfounded claims in recent days that former president Barack Obama led a “years-long coup” against Trump around his victorious 2016 election. The extraordinary narrative claims that Obama had ordered intelligence assessments to be manipulated to accuse Russia of election interference to help Trump. Yet it runs counter to four separate probes between 2019 and 2023 — each of them concluding that Russia did interfere and did, in various ways, help Trump. Epstein was found hanging dead in his New York prison cell while awaiting trial on charges that he sexually exploited hundreds of victims at his homes in New York and Florida.
– Ben Turner and Chris Lefkow
© 2024 AFP
