Maxwell told Justice Department she did not see Trump act in ‘inappropriate way’

Eric Tucker, Michael R Sisak and Alanna Durkin Richer, Associated Press

Jeffrey Epstein’s imprisoned former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell repeatedly denied to the US Justice Department witnessing any sexually inappropriate interactions with Donald Trump, according to records released on Friday meant to distance the Republican president from the disgraced financier.

The Trump administration issued hundreds of pages of transcripts from interviews that deputy attorney general Todd Blanche conducted with Maxwell last month as the administration was scrambling 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 records show Maxwell repeatedly showering Mr Trump with praise and denying under questioning from Mr Blanche that she had observed Mr Trump engaged in any form of sexual behaviour.

The administration was presumably eager to make such denials public at a time when the president has faced questions about a long-ago friendship with Epstein and as his administration has endured continued scrutiny over its handling of evidence from the case.

Political wounds

The transcript 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 send Congress evidence that they had previously kept from view.

“I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting,” Maxwell said, according 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.”

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.

She estimated that she had not seen Mr Trump since the mid-2000s, again in a social setting.

Asked if she ever heard Epstein or anyone else say Mr Trump “had done anything inappropriate with masseuses” or anyone else in their orbit, Maxwell replied: “Absolutely never, in any context.”

Sexually abused

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 Mr Blanche at a Florida courthouse.

Mr Blanche prefaced the interview by saying Maxwell had been given limited immunity, allowing her to speak freely without fear of prosecution for anything she said.

The only exceptions, he said, were if she lied or gave statements inconsistent with what she had previously said.

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.

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.

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 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.

Outrage

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”.

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.

But after a weeks-long review of evidence in the government’s possession, the Justice Department said last month that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted”.

The department noted that much of the material was placed under seal by a court to protect victims and “only a fraction” of it “would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial”.

Fury

Faced with fury from the base, Mr Trump sought to quickly turn the page, shutting down questioning of Ms Bondi about Epstein at a White House cabinet meeting and deriding as “weaklings” supporters who he said were falling for the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax”.

The kerfuffle also created bitter divisions within the administration, as Ms Bondi and Mr Bongino angrily clashed at a White House meeting last month.

Mr Bongino was uncharacteristically silent on social media for several days after that.