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The US Department of Justice wants to interview Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of helping the late financier sexually abuse underage girls and is now serving a lengthy prison sentence, officials said on Tuesday.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that anticipated meeting with Maxwell “in the coming days,” amid growing calls for the Trump administration to release more information about the government’s sex-trafficking investigation into Epstein.
Amid mounting pressure from parts of his MAGA base, US President Donald Trump last week asked the justice department to release all grand jury testimony in Epstein’s case.
“Trump has told us to release all credible evidence,” Blanche said in a post on X on Tuesday. “If Ghislane Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.”
A lawyer for Maxwell confirmed that discussions have taken place with the government.
“Ghislaine will always testify truthfully,” lawyer David Oscar Markus said on Tuesday. “We are grateful to President Trump for his commitment to uncovering the truth in this case.”
The overture to lawyers for Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 — is part of an ongoing justice department drive to portray itself as transparent following fierce backlash from many of Trump’s supporters over an earlier refusal to release additional records in the Epstein probe.
While the justice department filed a motion in a Manhattan federal court to unseal grand jury transcripts related to Epstein and Maxwell, that decision is ultimately up to a judge.
However, it’s considered unlikely that these files will offer any major revelations to conspiracy theorists obsessed with the case. The uproar over the Epstein files was never about the grand jury transcripts, but about the thousands of other documents in the government’s possession, which the Trump administration now says it will not release.
Epstein, who killed himself in his New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial, sexually abused children hundreds of times over more than a decade, according to authorities. Prosecutors say this exploitation was facilitated by his long-time companion Maxwell.
One of Epstein’s former lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, told Fox News in an interview on Sunday that the government should afford Maxwell immunity so that she can testify before Congress about her former partner’s crimes.
“She knows everything. She is the Rosetta Stone,” Dershowitz said in reference to Maxwell. “If she were just given use immunity, she could be compelled to testify.”
The Epstein files saga exploded into life earlier this month when US Attorney General Pam Bondi suddenly walked back the notion that Epstein had kept a “client list” of elites who participated in his trafficking of underage girls.
Trump quickly defended Bondi — who suggested in February that such a document was on her desk, only to later clarify that she was referring to the overall case file — and criticised his own supporters as “weaklings” for questioning the government’s probe.
Additional sources • AP