The attorney for imprisoned Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell said Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche questioned his client about “100 different people” suspected of victimizing girls in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring.
David Oscar Markus talked to reporters Friday after Maxwell’s second day of meeting with Mr. Blanche. Mr. Blanche traveled to question her at the minimum security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is serving a 20-year sentence on a sex trafficking conviction.
Maxwell, a onetime girlfriend and companion of Epstein’s, has asked the Supreme Court to toss her conviction. She also hopes President Trump will pardon her now that she has agreed to answer all the questions posed by the Justice Department about Epstein’s so-called client list.
Mr. Trump declined to say Friday whether he would offer Maxwell a pardon.
“It’s something I haven’t thought about,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.”
The president said journalists should be more interested in the Democrats who palled around with Epstein.
SEE ALSO: Trump urges reporters to focus on Democrats with links to Epstein
“They should speak about them because they don’t speak about them. They talk about me,” he told reporters at the White House.
Mr. Markus told reporters in Tallahassee that Maxwell “was asked about every possible thing you could imagine.”
Mr. Blanche sought to interview Maxwell after Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed that the Epstein files the Justice Department possessed did not include a client list.
Epstein, who authorities say committed suicide in his New York City jail cell in 2019 while he awaited prosecution on sex trafficking charges, remains a political flash point because of the wealthy and powerful men in his orbit.
Mr. Trump’s base of MAGA supporters says the Justice Department is shielding those men. Democrats accused Mr. Trump of trying to hide his involvement with Epstein. The two men were friends before parting ways in 2004.
Court documents from two lawsuits have exposed high-profile names associated with Epstein. They include former President Bill Clinton, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and tech mogul Bill Gates.
Mr. Trump’s name, like the others, appeared on Epstein’s flight logs from trips he took on the financier’s private jet in the 1990s. Mr. Trump is not known to have traveled to Epstein’s private island where some of the sex trafficking crimes took place.
Maxwell’s brother, businessman Ian Maxwell, told Spectator TV that she knows nothing about a client list and that one does not exist.
“My sister has always maintained there was never such a thing,” he said. “It never existed.”
Nevertheless, his sister is now the focus of the U.S. government’s renewed investigation into wealthy and powerful men who may have victimized Epstein’s sex-trafficked girls, some of whom were as young as 14.
Mr. Trump has called for the Justice Department to release any credible information on a list of the men, and Congress has subpoenaed Maxwell and the criminal files on the case.
Maxwell has asked the Supreme Court to throw out her conviction on the basis that she should have been shielded from prosecution under Epstein’s plea agreement in an earlier sex crime case.
Mr. Maxwell said his sister did not receive a fair trial and blamed a federal judge for sealing the government’s evidence, which could include exculpatory information that would help exonerate his sister.
He said he suspects Epstein paid somebody to kill him, which he called “suicide by internal killing on the grounds where perhaps he couldn’t see there was any exit for what was coming down the pike.”
He said of the low-security facility where his sister is imprisoned, “The food is atrocious, the conditions are really bad. We are hoping maybe she would be able to transfer.”
He called for a retrial “and potentially an exoneration.”
Mr. Maxwell said his sister regrets having ever met Epstein and that her relationship with Epstein has been misrepresented.
They were involved in a romantic relationship in the 1990s, he said, “and I think that he certainly broke her heart at some point.”
They did not live together, he said.
He said Epstein, whom he met once, seemed intelligent.
“You could tell he had a certain charisma. He asked very pointed questions, but it was all about eliciting information that might be helpful, valuable to him,” Mr. Maxwell said. “It’s quite clear that he did have a kind of Svengali control over people.”
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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