On Friday, lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell, longtime associate of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, confirmed that she had been moved from a low-security facility in Tallahassee, Florida, to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas.
Maxwell’s move came amid renewed attention on the so-called Epstein files, with Donald Trump facing intense scrutiny over his administration’s handling of the matter. It also comes a week after she sat down with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche for nine hours over two days in Florida.
Before Maxwell’s arrival in Texas was reported, MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin was asked about the interactions between Maxwell and the Trump administration on Thursday’s “Deadline: White House,” and called the timeline “curious.”
Rubin recounted that before that late July meeting between Blanche and Maxwell, the Trump administration, through Solicitor General D. John Sauer, submitted a brief to the Supreme Court arguing Maxwell’s conviction should stand. (Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 after being convicted of sex-trafficking-related crimes.) In that July 14 filing, Sauer shot down Maxwell’s claim that she was protected from prosecution due to Epstein’s 2007 plea agreement in Florida.
But the following day, Rubin recalled, on July 15, Trump was contacted by reporters from The Wall Street Journal about an alleged birthday card he had written to Epstein in 2003. Trump has denied the Journal’s reporting, but the president was inundated with questions about the details of his relationship with Epstein.
One week later, Blanche posted to social media that the Justice Department would reach out to Maxwell for an interview, and later that week, he met with her in Florida. Rubin noted that the government had “two days of conversations with her, not in the federal prison where she’s serving time, but in a U.S. Attorney’s Office, so she theoretically could be more comfortable during those conversations.” While we know that the meeting took place, Rubin stressed that many of the details are still unknown: “We still don’t know who else from the Department of Justice was there. We don’t know how that conversation was recorded, if at all. And yet, we still don’t know what the resolution is.” You can watch Rubin’s full recap of where things stand in Maxwell’s case in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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