Trump’s DOJ Reveals It Has Recording of Ghislaine Maxwell
A new CNN report reveals that the Trump administration possesses recordings of the Justice Department’s much-scrutinized closed-door meetings with Ghislaine Maxwell.
The recordings, per CNN, are now being transcribed and digitized, and “discussions over potential publication of the transcripts and audio” are ongoing. If the transcript is released, portions “that could reveal sensitive details like victim names” will likely be redacted.
Last month, Trump’s former personal attorney and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage girls.
Blanche said the point of the meeting—an apparent attempt to quell the furor over Trump’s lack of transparency on Epstein—was to ask Maxwell, “What do you know?”
After day one of the interview, which stretched over two days, Blanche wrote on X that the DOJ “will share additional information about what we learned at the appropriate time.” Maxwell’s attorney called it a “productive day.”
But many critics saw the meetings as a breeding ground for corruption, as Maxwell may have been incentivized to clear the name of the president—a former friend of Epstein whose name reportedly appears multiple times within the files—in exchange for clemency or a pardon.
Trump, meanwhile, distanced himself from Blanche’s meetings with Maxwell.
“I don’t know anything about it. They’re going to, what? Meet her?” Trump said when asked about the meeting late last month. “I don’t know about it, but I think it’s something that be—sounds appropriate to do, yeah.… I didn’t know that they were going to do it. I don’t really follow that too much.”
Trump has done little to dispel concerns that he may use Maxwell as a way out of the Epstein scandal, repeatedly reminding reporters that he’s “allowed” to grant her a pardon.
Releasing the Maxwell interviews might be a good first step for the self-proclaimed “most transparent” presidential administration to resolve the ongoing controversy.
But it would still fall far short of persistent demands to simply release the Epstein files in full. To do so, the president could waive his privacy rights to allow the mentions of him in the files to be unredacted—though I wouldn’t hold my breath.