It’s not unusual for prosecutors to meet with criminal defendants who may have valuable information to trade for beneficial treatment. But we may be witnessing one of the stranger instances of this phenomenon unfolding in real time, with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announcing Tuesday that he intends to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Blanche, one of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers who are now running the Justice Department in close coordination with the president, wrote on X:

Maxwell’s lawyer, Davis Oscar Markus, responded on X:

To try to understand what’s happening, let’s recap how we got here and then look at where we could be headed.

Maxwell is in prison after a jury found her guilty in 2021 of conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors. She and Epstein were both charged during the first Trump administration. Maxwell currently has a release date in 2037, and she has a pending petition with the Supreme Court to try to overturn her conviction. The Justice Department opposed her petition just last week, and we don’t know yet whether the high court will take up her appeal; we may hear from the court about that in the fall.

Meanwhile, Trump has faced intense political backlash from some of his supporters, who have questioned his administration’s commitment to uncovering and releasing the full scope of information related to Epstein, amid questions of Trump’s personal ties to the disgraced financier. Epstein died in custody in 2019 while awaiting trial, in what the medical examiner deemed a suicide.

With that brief background in mind, let’s examine the incentives.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the 63-year-old Maxwell probably wants to avoid spending the next decade-plus in prison. Blanche probably wants to use the tools of the justice system to help Trump politically, like the DOJ tried to do in the Eric Adams case, for example.

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If those are the incentives, then the question becomes: How do Maxwell and Blanche work together to help Trump?

One avenue could be “clearing” the president in some way, even though he hasn’t been accused of any crime here and it’s therefore unclear what form such a clearance would take. But putting aside however convincing or unconvincing such a clearance would be, given the context and the incentives, would that do the job that Blanche could be intending to carry out? Would Trump trade a pardon for that alone?

If not, then that raises the question of whether Maxwell could help make a case against some other person or persons who haven’t yet been charged. That’s a typical sort of thing that a defendant would help a prosecutor do. Of course, that then raises the typical issues of working with cooperators and problems with their credibility — but on steroids here. That’s because any information she shares now would be coming out years after the fact and not while she faces potential incarceration, as cooperators often do before they’re sentenced, but while she is actively incarcerated and has every incentive to get out of that situation as soon as possible and to do so in a way that pleases the president.

That said, it’s difficult to analyze the value of Maxwell’s potential cooperation one way or the other without knowing specifically what she would share. In any cooperation situation, the name of the game is corroboration. Therefore, in looking at this situation from the perspective of a prosecutor who would have to make a case based on Maxwell’s potential cooperation, she should not only have to be willing to implicate some other person or persons, but also be able to help prove it. Ideally, that would be with documentary or other objective evidence in a hypothetical case in which the defense would have ample room for cross-examination, given how this cooperation would have come about.

In that respect, Blanche and the Trump DOJ may have embarked on a new leg of this journey that is difficult to carry out successfully, especially if they intend to rely at all on third parties (like judges and juries) as opposed to clemency alone, over which Trump has unilateral control.

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