President Donald Trump weighed pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell for fear that she would spill secrets about his decade-long friendship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
After Maxwell, now 63, was arrested by the FBI in July 2020 for allegedly helping Epstein run his sex-trafficking ring—luring and grooming young girls into a web of abuse—Trump grew “very wary” and began asking, “What could she say—what would she say?” author Michael Wolff said on the Daily Beast Podcast.
Trump and Epstein had been friends since the 1980s. Wolff described them as “two guys joined at the hip for a good 15 years.”
“They did everything together,” the Trump biographer told host Joanna Coles. “And this is from sharing, pursuing women, hunting women, sharing at least one girlfriend for at least a year, and this kind of rich-guy relationship with each other’s planes.”
He added, “I dare say they kind of loved each other. These [sic] were brothers in arms for a long time.”
When it became clear that Maxwell—who became romantically linked to Epstein in the early 1990s—would be brought to trial on sex trafficking charges, Trump mulled using his executive powers to pardon her, according to Wolff.
Trump’s inner circle pushed back on the idea, however, warning him that it would blow up in his face.
“Everybody around him was kind of like, ‘God, we hope she won’t say anything, but we really hope he doesn’t pardon her,’” said Wolff, who has published four tell-all books on the president.
Trump, then in his first term, didn’t go through with the pardon. But when asked about Maxwell’s looming trial, he struck an oddly sympathetic tone.
“I just wish her well, frankly. I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach,” Trump told reporters. “I wish her well, whatever it is.”
Reached for comment, Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said, “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of shit and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
A senior White House official told the Daily Beast that there have been no conversations regarding a pardon for Maxwell and that none will take place.
Maxwell, who did not testify during her trial in New York, was eventually convicted on five of six federal charges, including sex trafficking of a minor. She was handed a 20-year prison sentence in 2022.
A leaked Department of Justice memo revealed Sunday that the Trump administration has essentially closed the book on Epstein—who died in his jail cell in 2019—concluding he was neither murdered nor maintained a “client list” of powerful elites.
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