Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted co-conspirator of notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, explicitly appealed to President Donald Trump for clemency on Tuesday.
In a response to the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena to force Maxwell to testify on August 11, her attorney David Oscar Markus enumerated certain conditions for her deposition. Or, he wrote, Maxwell could be given clemency.
Markus’s letter, posted to X, says, “if Ms. Maxwell were to receive clemency, she would be willing—and eager—to testify openly and honestly, in public, before Congress in Washington, D.C.” Markus said Maxwell would welcome the opportunity to “share the truth” and address purported “misconceptions and misstatements that have plagued this case from the beginning.”
In other words, Maxwell has offered to give our TV president the televised spectacle of his dreams, testifying in public if he simply waves away at least part of her sentence.
The suggestion comes as Trump’s allies increasingly regard Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for helping Epstein sexually abuse underage girls, as a potential means for the administration to escape the persistent scandal surrounding his past ties to, and lack of transparency about, Epstein’s case.
Trump, for his part, has conspicuously avoided answering whether he’s considered granting Maxwell a pardon or clemency, while asserting that he’s “allowed” to do so.
Meanwhile, Trump’s deputy attorney general last week met behind closed doors with Maxwell twice, leading many critics and Democratic lawmakers to observe the plain potential for corruption in such sit-downs.
Markus’s letter mentioned clemency as an alternative to a set of three conditions he asked the Oversight Committee to grant, lest Maxwell invoke the Fifth Amendment and decline to testify: first, granting her immunity; second, sharing its questions in advance; and third, having her appear only after the resolution of two pending attempts at post-conviction relief (these being a Supreme Court petition and a forthcoming writ of habeas corpus).
Hovering over all of this are obvious concerns about Maxwell’s credibility. While House Speaker Mike Johnson said he supported the committee’s decision to subpoena, he also, of all people, sensibly observed: “Could she be counted on to tell the truth? Is she a credible witness? I mean, this is a person who’s been sentenced to many, many years in prison for terrible, unspeakable, conspiratorial acts, and acts against innocent young people. I mean, can we trust what she’s going to say?”
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