DOJ slides into DMs of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell

They're gonna make her an offer she can't refuse.

Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell in October 1997. (Arnaldo Magnani/Getty)

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The Republican Party runs on conspiracy theories. From birtherism to Pizzagate to the Big Lie, nothing animates the base like preposterous yarns about nefarious cabals doing dastardly deeds behind closed doors. And if it distracts voters from the open looting of the public fisc, so much the better!

No one understands this better than Donald Trump, whose singular superpower is a total disregard for the truth or falsity of anything that comes out of his own mouth. And so he happily encourages dangerous lies about child sex abuse.

“I know nothing about QAnon,” he protested to journalist Savannah Guthrie during a televised town hall in 2020. “I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard. But I know nothing about it.”

Trump betrays his conspiracy-addled base

Trump spent years palling around with notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and even joked to New York Magazine that his buddy “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” And yet he blithely implied that Bill Clinton was the real pervert.

“Did Bill Clinton go to the island? That's the question. If you find that out, you're going to know a lot," he said after Epstein’s suicide in 2019.

Trump seemed to think he could murder hypocrisy on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote, and so his administration was blindsided by the rising tide of anger over its handling of the so-called “Epstein files.” His minions cast about for the usual distractions, desperately smashing the Barack Obama! and Hillary Clinton! buttons. They even went old school and tried to Martin Luther King! their way out of the problem.

And now they’re making a Hail Mary pass to the woman who started it all: Ghislaine Maxwell.

Deputy AG Todd Blanche announced Tuesday on X that he will meet with Maxwell soon to ask, “what do you know?”

In 2020, the government pointed to Maxwell’s “willingness to brazenly lie under oath about her conduct” as a reason to deny her bail. Now, with her entire life in the government’s control, it turns to her as a source of truth. Or, if not truth, a story that can help the president out of this jam.

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Back when America was great again

In the early ‘90s, Maxwell, a broke English socialite, was Epstein’s girlfriend. But when the relationship ran its course, she stayed in his orbit as a sort of companion and manager, ensuring that his homes ran smoothly and his needs were met. Those needs included sexual gratification by young girls, and Maxwell is alleged to have trawled trailer parks and spas looking for vulnerable children for Epstein to abuse.

In 2020, she was indicted in New York for child sex trafficking, and in 2021 she was convicted and sentenced to 20 years.

(Image from Maxwell indictment)

Trump, who has a long history of socializing with Maxwell, seemed unable to condemn her behavior.

Maxwell appealed the jury verdict, arguing that she received immunity under the terms of a 2007 plea deal negotiated for Epstein in Florida by a high-powered legal team that included Alan Dershowitz. The Harvard Law professor looms large in this thanks to his association with both Epstein and Trump, whom he defended during his first impeachment. Dershowitz denied multiple allegations that he participated in sexual abuse of young girls, famously insisting that he’d only gotten a massage once at Epstein’s house, but it was from a very old Russian woman, and he kept his underpants on.

To make the string board even stringier, Trump’s first labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, was the US Attorney in the Southern District of Florida who negotiated the lenient deal in 2007. He was forced to resign in 2019 amid public outcry over his role in an agreement that allowed the serial abuser to plead guilty to soliciting a prostitute and clear his ticket by sleeping at the jail for 13 months.

In September, the Second Circuit rejected Maxwell’s appeal, and in May she filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court. After multiple delays, Trump’s Solicitor General John Sauer — another former Trump lawyer — decided last week that the administration opposes overturning her conviction.

The revolution eats its children

The DOJ’s indecision with respect to Maxwell is part of a larger pattern. After years of feeding their supporters tales of a vast coverup, Trump’s minions seem paralyzed upon finding themselves in a position to uncover it.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, yet another former Trump lawyer, tried to fob off right-wing influencers with an invitation to the White House and binders of evidence already in the public record. FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, both veteran culture warriors, solemnly begged the public to take their word that Epstein’s jailhouse suicide was nothing more than that.

Trump's effort to distance from Epstein complicated by his deep ties to Epstein

The effort to turn the conspiracy juggernaut around was always doomed. But the spectacularly bungled release of the Epstein cellblock footage didn’t help. Nor did Bondi’s promise on Fox that the “Epstein files” were “sitting on my desk right now to review,” followed by a memo insisting that there was no “client list” and the DOJ would not countenance the release of “child pornography.”

MAGA world screamed, and then Trump screamed, too, when the Wall Street Journal published a story alleging that he’d sent “bawdy” greetings for an album compiled by Maxwell to celebrate Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. Like a man with his foot caught in a trap trying to shoot it off, Trump immediately filed a ludicrous lawsuit against the Journal and its owner Rupert Murdoch. On the same day that CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski dug up photos of Epstein at Trump’s second wedding, the president howled that it was defamatory to suggest that he and Epstein socialized together.

The Journal followed up yesterday with a report that Trump’s name does indeed appear in the Epstein “files” that were on Bondi’s desk at Main Justice, and that Bondi told Trump so in May — something he denied just last week.

Notably, the Journal’s latest story has four bylines, none of whom was on last week’s piece about the birthday drawing. If, as Trump alleged in his lawsuit, reporters at the Journal “concocted” the letter “to inextricably link President Trump to Epstein,” then the entire conservative newsroom is in on it. And so is the New York Times, which quickly matched the Journal’s reporting.

None of this is going to make the cries of a coverup go away. But it does hand a lot of power to the one person who knows exactly what happened 25 years ago.

The opportunity of a lifetime (behind bars)

Bondi, whose desk is apparently so messy that she can’t find files with her boss’s name on them, seems intent on looking everywhere but her office for information on Jeffrey Epstein.

The Justice Department made a big show of filing motions to unseal grand jury transcripts from Maxwell and Epstein’s prosecutions. They were immediately rebuffed by three courts, since grand jury materials are sealed by law, and, while judges can unseal them for good cause, these particular documents will contain information on minor victims of sex crimes. As Bondi and Blanche knew perfectly well when they stomped theatrically into the courtroom!

Now Bondi, who insists that her shop “does not shy away from uncomfortable truths,” announces that she’s eager to sit down with a convicted sex trafficker and hear what she has to say. Presumably this curiosity does not extend to confirmation of the Journal’s reporting about smutty birthday scribbles “among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago.” (Nor does it extend to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man she illegally deported to a gulag and then falsely accused of being a human trafficker.)

Bondi Tuesday on X: “I anticipate meeting with Ms. Maxwell in the coming days.”

Maxwell stands little chance of getting out of jail for more than a decade absent a pardon from Trump, so she has every incentive in the world to tell him exactly what he wants to hear and nothing else. Clearly the DOJ is in the market for info about Bill Clinton, and not the sitting president.

For her part, Maxwell seems to have correctly read the room.

“I can confirm that we are in discussions with the government and that Ghislaine will always testify truthfully. We are grateful to President Trump for his commitment to uncovering the truth in this case,” her lawyer David Oscar Markus tweeted.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is in a trap of its own making. After promising maximum transparency with respect to Epstein, they claimed that nothing else could be released without compromising minor victims. Now they say that Trump’s appearance in the investigatory records is merely incidental, which would appear to contradict the claim that it’s all unreleasable child sex abuse material.

The government could today make public everything that is not child sex abuse material. But instead it’s demanding judges to surrender information that they almost certainly cannot release.

And so Bondi and Blanche, Trump’s personal lawyers put in charge of running the DOJ, are turning to a convicted sex trafficker serving what is effectively a life sentence with an offer she can’t refuse — if she knows what’s good for her.

It’s enough to make anyone a conspiracy theorist.

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