Jeffrey Epstein's former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, is transferred to a prison camp in Texas
WASHINGTON — Jeffrey Epstein's former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved from a federal prison in Florida to a prison camp in Texas as her criminal case generates renewed public attention.
The federal Bureau of Prisons said Friday that Maxwell had been transferred to Bryan, Texas, but did not explain the circumstances. Her attorney confirmed the move but also declined to discuss the reasons for it.
Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of helping Epstein sexually abuse underage girls and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She had been held at a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, until her transfer to the prison camp in Texas, where other inmates include Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Jen Shah of 'The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.'
Minimum-security federal prison camps house inmates the Bureau of Prisons considers to be the lowest security risk. Some don't even have fences.
The prison camps were originally designed with low security to make operations easier and to allow inmates tasked with performing work at the prison, like landscaping and maintenance, to avoid repeatedly checking in and out of a main prison facility.
Maxwell's case has been the subject of heightened public focus since an outcry over the Justice Department's statement last month saying that it would not be releasing any additional documents from the Epstein sex trafficking investigation.
Since then, administration officials have tried to cast themselves as promoting transparency in the case, including by requesting from courts the unsealing of grand jury transcripts.
Maxwell was interviewed at a Florida courthouse over two days last week by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
The House Oversight Committee has separately said that it wants to speak with Maxwell. Her lawyers said this week that she would be open to an interview but only if the panel were to give her immunity from prosecution for anything she said.
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Associated Press Writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.
Eric Tucker, The Associated Press
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Globe and Mail
2 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
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We are on a slippery slope, folks. President Trump said BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer would be 'replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,' claiming in a social- media post the government's jobs numbers were manipulated. What utter nonsense, but nary a peep from Congress who worry about being primaried. Never mind that Ms. McEntarfer wasn't merely nominated to the post by then President Joe Biden, but she was confirmed by the Senate 86-8 in January 2024 – and Vice President JD Vance, then a senator, was among those voting for her! Did she all of a sudden become incompetent? Hard to fathom. I hardly would fire a BLS commissioner because of the headline or revisions to the data, which are normal – in fact, the sort of downward revisions we saw in the last two months, while very large, is hardly without precedent. We have seen revisions close to this no fewer than two dozen times back to 1980. Nobody else ever got fired over it. 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By the time the third revision comes in, and the response rate goes to 94%, where it's always been in the past and it is only then that the BLS truly has enough information collected for anyone to get an accurate portrayal of what the labor market really looked like in the month of the first release. It's really something that only now are people paying attention to the fact that first estimates get revised as more accurate information is received. This has been a fact of life… forever. Nobody was talking about it a month ago, funny enough. And there will be future benchmark revisions in the future as even more information comes in. Everyone who follows the data closely knows that there is a high error term in the initial release of everything from payrolls to retail sales to GDP. It is all written up each month in the detailed notes to the data releases. The price paid to receive information quickly is the accuracy, as it pertains to the initial report. Nobody is amazed that we got July data on the first day of August? And this number will get revised too, for sure. These are preliminary estimates only with a large error term only because the sample size with the first stab at the employment report is so small. Why is everyone so shocked? It's not as if the BLS hides from the fact that the smaller the sample size, the larger the error term … this is taken right from the report (the range of possibilities is huge but is stated for the record): 'The confidence interval for the monthly change in total nonfarm employment from the establishment survey is on the order of plus or minus 136,000 … The precision of estimates also is improved when the data are cumulated over time … in the establishment survey, estimates for the most recent 2 months are based on incomplete returns; for this reason, these estimates are labeled preliminary in the tables. It is only after two successive revisions to a monthly estimate, when nearly all sample reports have been received, that the estimate is considered final.' Maybe the way the BLS reports the data should be changed, but it is at behest of the companies reporting in their payroll on time and accurately. Maybe those in the trading pits should be forced to wait two to three months for the better estimate instead of being spoon fed something quick with a low sample size. You just need to compare the business response rate of the first NFP estimate to the month containing the second revision – as aforementioned, from around 58% to 94% -- to see how the BLS is forced to make guesswork out of the 42% of the business universe that fail to report their headcount on time. The information trickles in the next two months. Maybe there should be a financial penalty applied to the firms who don't send in their information on time. I've been talking about this discrepancy for the past few years … and, in fact, the revisions have constantly been on the downside. The next question is why have the revisions been squarely to the downside, even before last Friday's report? Prior to what we saw unfold on Friday, there were downward revisions to every month of the year, and they totalled 188,000. That was before the downward two-month revision of 258,000 in May and June. Ergo, this has been a pattern all year long and transcends what happened in the July report. There is also the question as to why the data are constantly being revised lower. This is akin to asking why the prior payroll data were so artificially inflated. Once again, at the time of that initial release, the BLS is compelled to deal with whack load of guesswork. It must fill in the gaps from the fact that, once again, the initial response rate is historically so low. There is a huge information gap. 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The Conference Board's consumer confidence survey showed only 30% of those polled stating that jobs were 'plentiful', the lowest since April 2021 – surely households would have a pretty good idea of what their job situation is, don't you think? But just in case you want to have the President and CEO of the Conference Board fired too, his name is Steve Odland, and I'm sure he is not too hard to find. There are plenty of culprits around these days spreading bad labour market news. David Rosenberg is founder of Rosenberg Research.
CTV News
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- Globe and Mail
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