Ghislaine Maxwell, the former partner of Jeffrey Epstein, told a top Justice Department official she never saw Donald Trump in an “inappropriate setting,” according to a transcript of an interview released on Friday.
“I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript of her two-day interview last month with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. “The President was never inappropriate with anybody.”
Maxwell also told Mr Blanche that she was not aware of any “client list” of Epstein’s.
Epstein’s friendships with wealthy and powerful individuals have fueled conspiracy theories that others were involved with his crimes, but no one other than he and Maxwell have been charged with crimes.
READ MORE
The Justice Department’s publication of the interview comes as Mr Trump has faced criticism from his conservative base of supporters and congressional Democrats over the Justice Department’s decision not to release the files from its Epstein investigation.
Epstein was arrested in 2019 on sex trafficking charges, accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, and was found dead a month later in a New York prison cell in what investigators described as a suicide. He had pleaded not guilty.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence after her 2021 sex trafficking conviction. Prosecutors said she recruited underage girls for Epstein to abuse during encounters that began as massages and then escalated into unwanted sexual activity. She has asked the US Supreme Court to overturn her conviction.
Mr Trump knew Epstein socially in the 1990s and early 2000s.
During the 2021 trial of Maxwell, the financier’s longtime pilot, Lawrence Visoski, testified that Mr Trump flew on Epstein’s private plane multiple times.
Mr Trump has denied flying on the plane.
Maxwell told Mr Blanche she never saw Mr Trump receive a massage.
“As far as I’m concerned, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript. “And I just want to say that I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the President now.”
It comes as the Trump administration scrambles to present itself as transparent amid a fierce backlash over an earlier refusal to disclose a trove of records from the sex trafficking case.
The disclosure represents the latest Trump administration effort to repair self-inflicted political wounds after failing to deliver on expectations that its own officials had created through conspiracy theories and bold pronouncements that never came to pass.
By making public two days worth of interviews, officials appear to be hoping to at least temporarily keep at bay sustained anger from Mr Trump’s base even as they continue to sit on other evidence they had suggested was being prepared for public release.
Maxwell recalled knowing about Mr Trump and possibly meeting him for the first time in 1990, when her newspaper magnate father, Robert Maxwell, was the owner of the New York Daily News.
“I may have met Donald Trump at that time, because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript.
Maxwell said her father was fond of Mr Trump’s then-wife, Ivana, “because she was also from Czechoslovakia, where my dad was from”.
The British one-time socialite, who was convicted in 2021 of helping lure teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein, was interviewed over the course of two days last month by deputy attorney general Todd Blanche at a Florida courthouse.
After her interview, Maxwell was moved from the low-security federal prison in Florida where she had been serving a 20-year sentence to a minimum security prison camp in Texas.
Neither her lawyer nor the federal Bureau of Prisons have explained the reason for the move.
The Epstein case had long captured public attention in part because of the wealthy financier’s social connections over the years to prominent figures including the Duke of York, former US president Bill Clinton and Mr Trump, who has said his relationship with Epstein ended years before.
The saga has consumed the Trump administration over the last month following an abrupt two-page announcement from the FBI and Justice Department that Epstein had killed himself despite conspiracy theories to the contrary, that a “client list” that US attorney general Pam Bondi had intimated was on her desk did not actually exist and that no additional documents from the high-profile investigation were suitable to be released.
The announcement produced outrage from conspiracy theorists, online sleuths and Trump supporters who had been hoping to see proof of a government cover-up, an expectation driven in part by comments from officials including FBI director Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who on podcasts before taking their current positions had repeatedly promoted the idea that damaging details about prominent people were being withheld.
Mr Patel, for instance, said in at least one podcast interview before becoming director that Epstein’s “black book” was under the “direct control of the director of the FBI”.
[ Epstein scandal: Letters from famous figures publishedOpens in new window ]
The administration had an early stumble in February when far-right influencers were invited to the White House in February and provided by Ms Bondi with binders marked “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “Declassified” that contained documents that had largely already been in the public domain.
After the first release fell flat, Ms Bondi said officials were poring over a “truckload” of previously withheld evidence she said had been handed over by the FBI and raised expectations of forthcoming releases. - Reuters/AP
