On the menu today: Federal prisoner 02879-509 — Ghislaine Maxwell — will be interviewed by the U.S. Department of Justice today, and is scheduled to be questioned by the House Oversight Committee next month. And yet, Maxwell appears confident she’s going to get either a pardon or a commuted sentence. Considering the heinous nature of her infamous crimes, that’s either a delusion or a sign that there’s another shoe to drop.
Maxwell’s Silver Bullet?
Right now, 63-year-old Ghislaine Maxwell resides at Federal Correctional Institution, Tallahassee, a low-security U.S. federal prison.
In December 2021, Maxwell was convicted on five counts, including one of sex trafficking of a minor, for her role in a scheme to sexually exploit and abuse multiple underage girls with Jeffrey Epstein over the course of a decade. In June 2022, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison; she is eligible for release July 17, 2037.
Maxwell ranks among the most notorious, widely despised, and high-profile figures in federal prison right now, alongside Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the so-called “20th hijacker” of 9/11, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Oklahoma City bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols.
And yet, according to reports in the New York Post, Maxwell feels surprisingly confident that President Donald Trump is going to give her a pardon or commuted sentence.
The Post quotes a “jailhouse source” as declaring, “Before, she would tell everybody that she was waiting for Donald Trump to be reelected and become president, that things were going to be different then. . . . Max was quite confident that things were going to change with her case. . . . Freedom is 100 percent her focus. She says, ‘I will not be here in 20 years.’”
Is that a delusion? Or does Maxwell have some legitimate reason to think that Trump, who himself was friends with Jeffrey Epstein for many years before a dispute over the purchase of an oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach ended their friendship, is going to use his presidential power to set her free?
On Tuesday morning, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche posted on X, “Justice demands courage. For the first time, the Department of Justice is reaching out to Ghislaine Maxwell to ask: what do you know? At attorney general Pam Bondi’s direction, I’ve contacted her counsel. I intend to meet with her soon. No one is above the law — and no lead is off-limits.”
According to ABC News, that meeting occurs today.
First . . . could this really be the “first time” the U.S. Department of Justice has interviewed Maxwell asking questions about who else was involved in the sex trafficking ring or exploiting underage girls? Or is Blanche just hand-waiving away any previous law-enforcement questioning of Maxwell?
Second, Maxwell is unlikely to just name names of people who committed serious crimes and not expect anything in return. Is this why she reportedly feels so confident she’ll get a pardon or a commuted sentence?
Wednesday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer announced via X that he had “issued a subpoena to Ghislaine Maxwell for a deposition to occur at Federal Correctional Institution Tallahassee on August 11, 2025. The Department of Justice is cooperating and will help facilitate the deposition at the prison.”
The problem is that anyone can invoke their Fifth Amendment rights before a congressional committee. Comer can ask whatever he wants, but Maxwell may not be all that interested in answering.
Asked about the DOJ interview of Maxwell Tuesday, Trump told reporters, “Yeah, I don’t know about it. But I think it’s something that would be — sounds appropriate to do, yeah.”
But then the tone of Trump’s comment changed. “I don’t really follow that too much. It’s a — it’s sort of a witch hunt, just a continuation of the witch hunt.”
Does Trump really believe that Maxwell is the victim of a “witch hunt”? That would be the sort of situation where a president would indeed issue a pardon or commute a sentence, right?
Trump and Maxwell were friends for many years; she is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a British media mogul, and Trump and the Maxwells and other celebrity guests partied on the mogul’s yacht, named the “Lady Ghislaine,” back in May 1989. Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell were seen socializing at the same high-society events. A mutual acquittance told the Washington Post in 2019 that Trump “was crazy about Maxwell, a very charming lady.”
No one has ever connected Trump to any criminal actions alongside Epstein. But as this newsletter noted earlier, a few of Trump’s past comments suggest he noticed that many of the women hanging around Epstein seemed particularly young.
Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested and charged in July 2020. You may recall who the president was back then; if she had something that she could use as leverage against Trump to force him to issue a pardon, why didn’t this occur in Trump’s first term?
Or has Maxwell concluded, with decades of prison time ahead of her, that she could make up something salacious and scandalous about Trump and make the president’s life miserable, and that Trump will pardon her to avoid that disastrous scenario?
If Trump were to let Maxwell out of jail, it would make the Hunter Biden pardon look like a minor kerfuffle.
Trump’s already had some bizarre swings in his comments about Epstein, previously indicating he intended to release all government information about the notorious sex trafficker, then raging on his Truth Social account that Epstein was “somebody that nobody cares about” and that the country should not “waste time and energy” on further discussion about him.
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that in May, Attorney General Pam Bondi told President Trump that his name appeared multiple times in the Epstein files. These files encompass “more than 300 gigabytes of Epstein-related material the FBI compiled as part of the recent review,” including “confiscated digital and documentary evidence from Epstein’s properties in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York.” With roughly 678,000 pages per gigabyte, that is about 203 million pages of documents.
If Trump did pardon Maxwell or commute her sentence, a whole lot of Americans — including many in the ranks of MAGA — would conclude that it represented a quid pro quo, purchasing her silence to cover up of some sort of dark secrets and past misdeeds on the part of Trump. The president cannot possibly be that self-destructive. . .
. . . can he?
TikTok
I applaud Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, for warning everyone yesterday, “There’s no real privacy for Americans while Chinese Communist Party apps operate freely on our phones.”
You could almost forget that Congress had passed a law to ban TikTok, a president had signed it, and the Supreme Court had upheld it, and the only reason that TikTok is still on so many American phones is because President Trump keeps ignoring the ban that he’s supposed to enforce. Three times, in violation of the written law, Trump has announced that he is delaying enforcement of the ban.
Not that Democrats can wiggle off the hook that easily; Punchbowl reports, “Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and his staff are pushing Democratic senators to create TikTok accounts for official purposes, despite a federal law banning the social media app on government devices.”
Are laws just optional now?
Gabbard
The Editors examine Tulsi Gabbard’s claim that new evidence implicates former President Barack Obama in an allegedly “treasonous” conspiracy around Russiagate, and are underwhelmed. Gabbard says she is referring Obama to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
Our Andy McCarthy points out that there’s more than one problem with Gabbard’s argument that Obama needs to be frog-marched in handcuffs:
Putting aside that Obama’s insidious actions were not crimes, that he was not charged by Durham after a four-year investigation, and that any possibility of indicting him for 2016–17 actions lapsed under the five-year statute of limitations years ago, does Gabbard disagree with Trump that former presidents must have immunity from prosecution?
More to the point, does Trump disagree with Trump?
Probably.
In Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled last year, “At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity.”
ADDENDUM: The Journal reports, “An internal probe at the World Economic Forum found that its founder Klaus Schwab engaged in a pattern of workplace misconduct over the past decade, including unauthorized spending by him and his wife, bullying behavior and inappropriate treatment of female staffers.” Shockingly, the guy who always looked, sounded, dressed, and acted like a James Bond supervillain turned out to be a bad guy.
As usual, it is the silliest posts on X that go viral.