WASHINGTON (AP) — Jeffrey Epstein’s imprisoned former girlfriend repeatedly denied to the Justice Division witnessing any sexually inappropriate interactions with Donald Trump, in response to information launched Friday meant to distance the Republican president from the disgraced financer.
The Trump administration issued tons of of pages of transcripts from interviews that Deputy Legal professional Basic Todd Blanche carried out with Ghislaine Maxwell final month because the administration was scrambling to current itself as clear amid a fierce backlash over an earlier refusal to reveal a trove of information from the sex-trafficking case.
The information present Maxwell repeatedly showering Trump with reward and denying beneath questioning from Blanche that she had noticed Trump engaged in any type of sexual habits. The administration was presumably desperate to make such denials public at a time when the president has confronted questions on a long-ago friendship with Epstein and as his administration has endured continued scrutiny over its dealing with of proof from the case.
The transcript launch represents the most recent Trump administration effort to restore self-inflicted political wounds after failing to ship on expectations that its personal officers had created by means of conspiracy theories and daring pronouncements that by no means got here to move. By making public two days of interviews, officers look like hoping to a minimum of briefly maintain at bay sustained anger from Trump’s base as they ship Congress proof they’d beforehand saved from view.
After her interview with Blanche, Maxwell was moved from the low-security federal jail in Florida to a minimum-security jail camp in Texas to proceed serving a 20-year sentence for her 2021 conviction on allegations that she lured teenage women to be sexually abused by Epstein. Her trial featured sordid accounts of the sexual exploitation of ladies as younger as 14 instructed by 4 ladies who described being abused as teenagers within the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s at Epstein’s properties.
Neither Maxwell’s attorneys nor the federal Bureau of Prisons have defined the rationale for the transfer, however one among her attorneys, David Oscar Marcus, stated in a social media submit Friday that Maxwell was “innocent and never should have been tried, much less convicted.”
‘Never inappropriate’
“I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting,” Maxwell stated, in response to the transcript. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”
Requested if she ever heard Epstein or anybody else say Trump “had done anything inappropriate with masseuses” or anybody else of their orbit, Maxwell replied, “Absolutely never, in any context.”
Maxwell, a onetime socialite who was convicted in 2021 of serving to lure teenage women to be sexually abused by Epstein, was interviewed over the course of two days final month by Blanche at a Florida courthouse. She was given restricted immunity, permitting her to talk freely with out worry of prosecution for something she stated aside from within the occasion of a false assertion.
In the meantime, the Justice Division on Friday started sending to the Home Oversight Committee information from the investigation that the panel says it intends to make public after eradicating sufferer’s data.
Excessive-profile contacts
The case had lengthy captured public consideration partly due to the rich financer’s social connections over time to distinguished figures, together with Prince Andrew, former President Invoice Clinton and Trump, who has stated he had a falling-out with Epstein years in the past and effectively earlier than Epstein got here beneath investigation.
Maxwell instructed Blanche that Clinton was initially her buddy, not Epstein’s, and that she by no means noticed him obtain a therapeutic massage — nor did she imagine he ever did. The one occasions they have been collectively, she stated, have been the 2 dozen or so occasions they traveled on Epstein’s airplane.
She additionally spoke glowingly of Britain’s Prince Andrew and dismissed as “rubbish” the late Virginia Giuffre’s declare that she was paid to have a relationship with Andrew and that he had intercourse along with her at Maxwell’s London dwelling.
“That would’ve been the only time that I think that President Clinton could have even received a massage,” Maxwell stated. “And he didn’t, because I was there.”
Maxwell sought to distance herself from Epstein’s conduct, repeatedly denying allegations made throughout her trial about her position. Although she acknowledged that at one level Epstein started preferring youthful ladies, she insisted she by no means understood that to “encompass children.”
“I did see from when I met him, he was involved or — involved or friends with or whatever, however you want to characterize it, with women who were in their 20s,” she instructed Blanche. “And then the slide to, you know, or younger looking women. But I never considered that this would encompass criminal behavior.”
Epstein was arrested in 2019 on sex-trafficking costs, accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage women, and was discovered useless a month later in a New York jail cell in what investigators described as a suicide.
A narrative that’s consumed the Justice Division
The saga has consumed the Trump administration following a two-page announcement from the FBI and Justice Division final month that Epstein had killed himself regardless of conspiracy theories on the contrary, {that a} “client list” that Legal professional Basic Pam Bondi had intimated was on her desk didn’t really exist, and that no further paperwork from the high-profile investigation have been appropriate to be launched.
The announcement produced outrage from conspiracy theorists, on-line sleuths and Trump supporters who had been hoping to see proof of a authorities coverup. That expectation was pushed partly by feedback from officers, together with FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who on podcasts earlier than taking their present positions had repeatedly promoted the concept that damaging particulars about distinguished individuals have been being withheld.
Patel, as an example, stated in a minimum of one podcast interview earlier than turning into director that Epstein’s “black book” was beneath the “direct control of the director of the FBI.”
The administration had an early stumble in February when far-right influencers have been invited to the White Home in February and offered by Bondi with binders marked “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “Declassified” that contained paperwork that had largely already been within the public area.
After the primary launch fell flat, Bondi stated officers have been poring over a “truckload” of beforehand withheld proof she stated had been handed over by the FBI and raised expectations of forthcoming releases.
However after a weekslong assessment of proof within the authorities’s possession, the Justice Division decided that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” The division famous that a lot of the fabric was positioned beneath seal by a court docket to guard victims and “only a fraction” of it “would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial.”
Confronted with fury from his base, Trump sought to rapidly flip the web page, shutting down questioning of Bondi about Epstein at a White Home Cupboard assembly and deriding as “weaklings” supporters who he stated have been falling for the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”
The Justice Division has responded to a subpoena from Home lawmakers by pledging to show over data.
Initially Printed: August 22, 2025 at 2:58 PM EDT
