Trump says he didn't order Ghislaine Maxwell's move to cushier Texas prison
President Donald Trump said he wasn't aware that the Justice Department was going to move convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to a cushier federal prison in Texas after the department interviewed her in July.
"I didn't know about it at all," Trump said on Aug. 5, when asked by a reporter if he approved the transfer. "I read about it just like you did."
Maxwell was moved in recent days from a low-security federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas. Her new home also houses Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and celebrity housewife Jen Shah.
Trump did say that anything requested by his deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, "would be totally appropriate." Blanche, who represented Trump personally in his 2024 New York criminal trial, interviewed Maxwell in Tallahassee, Florida, though it's unclear what exactly came of the closed-door discussions.
The government hasn't released transcripts from the interviews or revealed whether it will result in increased justice for Epstein's and Maxwell's victims.
"It's not a very uncommon thing," Trump added of Maxwell's move. But not everyone agrees with that characterization.
"It's a country club," former federal prison warden Robert Hood told the Washington Post of Maxwell's new home. "Inmates, if they have a sex offense, are not going to a place like that, period. It's truly unheard of."
Blanche interviewed Maxwell as the Justice Department has tried to quell public outrage over its decision not to release the FBI's investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, who died awaiting his federal sex-trafficking trial in 2019.
Maxwell, the daughter of a prominent British media mogul, Robert Maxwell, was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking a minor. Her seemingly favorable prison move outraged victims and their family members.
"President Trump has sent a clear message today: Pedophiles deserve preferential treatment and their victims do not matter," the surviving siblings of Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, said in a statement along with Epstein victim Annie Farmer and her sister, Maria Farmer.
Trump was friends with Epstein for many years, and socialized with both the disgraced financier and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's ex-girlfriend. The friendship ended around 2004.
Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to two Florida state prostitution crimes and was arrested by federal authorities in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges. New York's chief medical examiner ruled that his death that year in a Manhattan federal jail was a suicide.
Contributing: Josh Meyer, USA TODAY
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