As much as Trump has been trying to deflect from the Epstein controversy, “the Bonginos and the Kash Patels have been raising expectations on this, and now they’re not delivering,” says Uscinski. “And it looks really bad.” (Patel and Bongino did not return requests for comment.)
With all their efforts—putting agents on round-the-clock shifts to comb through Epstein documents, arming conservative influencers with binders full of largely public information about the case, and continued promises from the likes of Bongino to get to “not ‘my truth,’ or ‘your truth,’ but THE TRUTH”—Trump administration officials have kept setting up the base for further disappointment. The much-touted release of “raw” prison surveillance video from the night of Epstein’s death, for example, turned into a fiasco when WIRED reported that it appeared to have been modified.
And none of this has been made better by the possible pardoning of Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking of a minor and several other related charges; in sworn testimony, numerous Epstein accusers say Maxwell was instrumental to Epstein’s charge of sex trafficking of minors.
David Oscar Markus, Maxwell’s attorney (and a protege of Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s lawyers), has requested that she receive either a pardon or immunity before she sits for a deposition remotely from prison in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. That hearing, previously scheduled for August 11, has been postponed until at least the fall.
Eric Bolling, the former Fox News anchor who regularly appears on One America News Network and identifies as “OG MAGA,” tells me in a text message that he currently puts the odds of a Maxwell pardon at “50%” because “she may have provided information useful to Trump and the FBI/DOJ.” Maxwell’s attorney did not return a request for comment.
Todd Blanche, Trump’s criminal defense attorney and now the deputy attorney general, met with Maxwell behind closed doors at a low-security federal prison in Florida on July 24 and 25. Maxwell then secured a move to a minimum security prison camp in Texas, which was reported on August 1, despite appearing to be ineligible for a transfer to that prison camp as a sex offender.
On Tuesday, CNN reported that the Department of Justice is considering releasing the transcript of a DOJ interview with Maxwell recorded in July. Trump, notably, told his supporters in a mid-July post on Truth Social to “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”
Trump also, though, reopened wounds with the family of Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, when he alleged that Epstein “stole” her from his Mar-a-Lago club when she was working there as a teenager in 2000, and that this caused the break between the two men. (“She wasn’t stolen, she was preyed upon at his property, at President Trump’s property,” her brother told CNN.)
