This week, Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, revealed that a whistle-blower gave the House Committee on the Judiciary information about the special treatment that Ghislaine Maxwell is receiving at the minimum-security federal prison she was recently transferred to.
In a letter to Donald Trump, Raskin wrote that Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, has had custom meals delivered to her cell. The warden, he said, personally arranged for Maxwell to meet privately with family members and other visitors and even provided snacks and refreshments. According to Raskin, her guests were allowed to bring computers, potentially allowing her unauthorized communication with the outside world.
Maxwell was allegedly taken to the prison’s exercise room after hours so she could work out alone, and “allowed to enjoy recreation time in staff-only areas,” wrote Raskin. An inmate who trains service dogs was reportedly instructed to give her special access to a puppy. Raskin claimed that a top official at the prison said that he is “sick of having to be Maxwell’s bitch.”
Some of the details in Raskin’s letter were confirmed on Thursday by CNN, which added one more. Whereas other inmates carefully conserve their toilet paper because they’re given only two rolls a week, CNN reported, Maxwell “is given as much toilet paper as she needs. All she has to do is ask.”
What’s shocking here is not that Maxwell is being treated decently — all prisoners should be — but that she’s being treated so much better than everyone else. The relative pampering she’s enjoying seems particularly significant given newly released emails between her and Epstein suggesting she’s harboring some sort of secret about Trump.
On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three messages from a tranche they’d received from Epstein’s estate. (Perhaps trying to drown them out, Republicans then released more than 20,000 more.) “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote to Maxwell in 2011. One of his victims, Epstein wrote, “spent hours at my house with him. He has never once been mentioned.” Maxwell responded, “I have been thinking about that.”
Much about this email is ambiguous. Epstein could have been suggesting that Trump was keeping something quiet. Or he might have been expressing surprise that Trump hadn’t yet been dragged into his mess. Presumably, Maxwell could clear things up and explain the exact nature of Trump and Epstein’s entanglement. That’s why it’s striking that the Bureau of Prisons — which is part of the Justice Department — seems to be taking such extraordinary steps to keep her happy. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation for all the privileges she’s being accorded, but I can’t think of one.
Recall that on July 22, after Trump’s Justice Department and F.B.I. essentially closed the Epstein case, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell to testify. That day, Todd Blanche, the former Trump defense attorney now serving as deputy attorney general, announced he’d interview Maxwell himself. When they met, she told him she’d never witnessed Trump doing anything untoward. (She said the same of Epstein.)
Just days after speaking to Blanche, Maxwell was moved to a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, a much less restrictive facility with a reputation for relative comfort. The transfer was highly unusual because, under Bureau of Prisons policy, convicted sex offenders like Maxwell are not typically eligible for minimum security.
Many inside the system, Raskin told me, are upset about all the exceptions apparently being made for her. “There are lots of people in the prison, and there are lots of people in the government, who are extremely disenchanted with the favoritism and indulgences being showered upon Ghislaine Maxwell,” he said.
These indulgences look like part of a broader pattern. We’ve seen in recent days how desperate Trump is to keep the Justice Department’s Epstein files from coming out. For months now, Representatives Ro Khanna, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, have been collecting signatures on a so-called discharge petition to override House leadership and force a vote on the files’ release. This week, they got the signature they needed to put their measure over the top, thanks to the swearing in of Adelita Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona.
One of a handful of House Republicans to sign onto the petition was Lauren Boebert, usually a MAGA loyalist. On Wednesday, CNN reported that she’d been summoned to the Situation Room to meet with Blanche, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, to discuss the files. Boebert, who didn’t reverse her stance, denied that they’d tried to pressure her. But it’s extraordinary to have the leading law enforcement officials in the nation seemingly working to stop the vote, especially since even if the measure gets to Trump’s desk, he can just veto it.
The emails released this week don’t get us much closer to understanding what Trump could be hiding. Indeed, an email Epstein sent a few months before his arrest in 2019 suggests that while Trump might have been aware of Epstein’s child abuse, he didn’t participate in it. “He never got a massage,” Epstein wrote. Yet Epstein also seemed confident that he knew something damaging about Trump. “I am the one able to take him down,” he said in a 2018 text message about Trump.
Of course, Epstein was a self-aggrandizing criminal. The question remains: Why is Trump acting like he was right?
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