Trump Refuses to Answer Key Question About Ghislaine Maxwell
Donald Trump refused Monday to shut down speculation that he might legally forgive the convicted associate and longtime girlfriend of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, telling reporters at his Scottish golf club that no one had formally 'approached' him yet about the controversial idea.
'Would you completely rule out a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell?' asked a reporter. 'Is that something you would ever consider?'
'Well I'm allowed to give her a pardon,' Trump said. 'But nobody's approached me with it, nobody's asked me about it. It's in the news, about that. That aspect of it. But right now it would be inappropriate to talk about it.'
Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 for playing an active role in Epstein's crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. As president, Trump can dole out pardons for anyone convicted of a federal offense. But why he would choose to extend one to Maxwell prods at a more unsettling possibility.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—Trump's former personal attorney—met with Maxwell late last week, reportedly peeling 100 names from her in a potential pardon quid pro quo. After her second day with Blanche, Maxwell's team laid their cards on the table: They wanted a pardon from the president.
The interview followed weeks of mounting pressure on Trump from his base, who have clamored for the release of more documents from the Epstein files after the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of the pedophile's supposed client list.
In a last-ditch effort to quell the bubbling discontent and make the forthcoming Maxwell alliance more palatable, conservatives and Trump allies have attempted to make a martyr out of Maxwell, suggesting that the well-documented sex criminal could have been wrongly convicted and was unduly serving the sentence warranted to a deceased Epstein (Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding in the victimization of hundreds of girls).
'She deserves to be out,' Alan Dershowitz, Epstein's former lawyer, told Newsmax last week.
Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly disturbed by Trump's handling of the entire fiasco. A poll published by Emerson College Polling on Friday found that just 16 percent of Americans approved of the way Trump was managing the Epstein scandal, while more than half of polled Americans—51 percent—disapproved.
The spin is particularly humiliating for MAGA Republicans, especially those invested in QAnon. After years of their heralding Trump as a supposed messiah, believing that he would dish the dirt on a secretive, international web of sex traffickers, the administration now seems hell-bent on covering up its own ties to Epstein's island and the crimes committed there.
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