Wednesday’s revelation of three private emails in which Jeffrey Epstein suggested Donald Trump knew about his crimes wasn’t the only time the case of the millionaire pedophile was the subject of Capitol news. According to a document obtained by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, Ghislaine Maxwell, the financier’s wife, former partner and best friend, is maneuvering to convince Trump to pardon her. Maxwell is also the beneficiary of one of these new ones Emails in which Epstein tells him that one of his victims “spent hours” with Trump at one of the financier’s homes.
If the President of the United States approves this pardon, something he has not ruled out when asked on multiple occasions in recent months, the sentence for Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for her role in Epstein’s sex trafficking network, could be significantly reduced.
The document, which reached the Democrats through a close associate, is a letter from the prisoner to her lawyer, Lea Sufyan, in which she talks about her plans to send the documents through the warden of the minimum security prison in Texas, where she is serving her sentence. He lives there after his transfer, ordered by the Justice Department in August, from a Florida prison, where his detention conditions were more stringent.
The move came after Maxwell met for nine hours on two separate days with Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former lawyer. Not all details of the conversation were revealed at the time, other than the fact that Blanche compiled a list of one hundred names and watched as her questions were answered “candidly.” Democrats link the “preferential treatment” she has received since then to some kind of arrangement with the Trump administration.
In the letter to her lawyer that was revealed this week, the sender complained about the paperwork: “It is difficult for me to organize everything, it is very extensive and contains many attachments,” Epstein’s recruiter wrote. A member of British high society (and daughter of media mogul Robert Maxwell), she met the financier in New York in the 1990s and was his inseparable companion until 2019, the year in which he died in a maximum-security cell in Manhattan under strange circumstances and amid oversight failures by the officials responsible for her. At the time, Epstein was awaiting trial on charges of a trafficking ring and sexual assault of hundreds of minors.
White House Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt responded in an early afternoon press appearance in Washington on whether Trump was considering pardoning Maxwell. “That’s not something I talk about, or even think about, right now,” he replied. “I can assure you.”
The Supreme Court recently rejected an appeal by Maxwell against the 20-year prison sentence he received in 2022 for procuring victims for Epstein and also participating in some of his crimes. With that path to freedom ruled out, pardon is now his only option.
Maxwell also requested immunity to testify before a House committee at a hearing initially scheduled for September 11, which was postponed until the 29th of that month, and never held, due to the government shutdown, which on Wednesday was coming to an end during its 43rd day.
In a letter to Trump, Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, noted that Trump had also received information from a confidant that Maxwell was receiving preferential treatment in prison. “They cook her own food, prepared by prison staff,” Raskin wrote, adding that her views are allowed to carry a computer, and that the warden allows her to serve “refreshments to her guests.”
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