Ghislaine Maxwell: Trump says he wasn't told of move to Texas prison
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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Illustration by André Carrilho I was outside the gates of Highgrove House when the unmarked police car pulled up behind me. It was shortly before 9am on a chilly Sunday morning in July. A sign affixed to the high grey stone wall warned that trespass on the estate, near Tetbury in Gloucestershire, owned by the Duchy of Cornwall and rented for the foreseeable future by His Majesty the King, was a criminal offence. Trespass was not my intention, although I was vaguely aware that journalists – most of them enterprising Frenchmen – have been banged up for getting too close to the house before. The police officer, a balding, hulking man in official black with a danger-yellow taser velcroed to him, asked me what I was doing. I had been waiting by the gate for a few minutes, and couldn't see the camera that had obviously seen me. I told the officer I was here for the 'Harmony in Nature Wellness Day' that I had blown £180 on. 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Simultaneously his solace and his redemption, the garden, he once said, was 'the outward expression of my inner self'. For his Herculean efforts, Charles was awarded a modest label by television's Alan Titchmarsh in a documentary 15 years ago: 'The best royal gardener in history.' The ulterior purpose of Highgrove is mentioned less often and was perhaps unknown, even to Titchmarsh. The prince, as he then was, wanted a residence of his own to 'convene' the great power players and personalities of his future kingdom. Few have been able to resist a private lunch with Charles at Highgrove, according to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby. A list of the government ministers who have been Jaguared to the house and the minutes of their discussions with Charles would make a revealing alternative history of the official British mind between 1981 and 2021. Recent years have brought changes, though; privacy and powerbrokering have given way to something much more public. 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