Washington, 23 August

Jeffrey Epstein's imprisoned former girlfriend repeatedly denied to the Justice Department witnessing any sexually inappropriate interactions with Donald Trump, according to records released Friday meant to distance the Republican president from the disgraced financer.

The Trump administration issued hundreds of pages of transcripts from interviews that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche conducted with Ghislaine Maxwell last month as the administration was scrambling to present itself as transparent amid a fierce backlash over an earlier refusal to disclose a trove of records from the sex-trafficking case.

The records show Maxwell repeatedly showering Trump with praise and denying under questioning from Blanche that she had observed Trump engaged in any form of sexual behaviour.

The administration was presumably eager to make such denials public at a time when the president has faced questions about a long-ago friendship with Epstein and as his administration has endured continued scrutiny over its handling of evidence from the case.

The transcript release represents the latest Trump administration effort to repair self-inflicted political wounds after failing to deliver on expectations that its own officials had created through conspiracy theories and bold pronouncements that never came to pass.

By making public two days of interviews, officials appear to be hoping to at least temporarily keep at bay sustained anger from Trump's base as they send Congress evidence they had previously kept from view.

After her interview with Blanche, Maxwell was moved from the low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas to continue serving a 20-year sentence for her 2021 conviction on allegations that she lured teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.

Her trial featured sordid accounts of the sexual exploitation of girls as young as 14 told by four women who described being abused as teens in the 1990s and early 2000s at Epstein's homes.

Neither Maxwell's lawyers nor the federal Bureau of Prisons have explained the reason for the move, but one of her lawyers, David Oscar Marcus, said in a social media post Friday that Maxwell was “innocent and never should have been tried, much less convicted.”

“I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

Maxwell recalled knowing about Trump and possibly meeting him for the first time in 1990, when her newspaper magnate father, Robert Maxwell, was the owner of the New York Daily News. She said she often had been to Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, sometimes alone, but hadn't seen Trump since the mid-2000s.

Asked if she ever heard Epstein or anyone else say Trump “had done anything inappropriate with masseuses” or anyone else in their orbit, Maxwell replied, “Absolutely never, in any context.”

Maxwell, a onetime socialite who was convicted in 2021 of helping lure teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein, was interviewed over the course of two days last month by Blanche at a Florida courthouse.

She was given limited immunity, allowing her to speak freely without fear of prosecution for anything she said except for in the event of a false statement.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department on Friday began sending to the House Oversight Committee records from the investigation that the panel says it intends to make public after removing victim's information.

The case had long captured public attention in part because of the wealthy financer's social connections over the years to prominent figures, including Prince Andrew, former President Bill Clinton and Trump, who has said he had a falling-out with Epstein years ago and well before Epstein came under investigation.

Maxwell told Blanche that Clinton was initially her friend, not Epstein's, and that she never saw him receive a massage - nor did she believe he ever did. The only times they were together, she said, were the two dozen or so times they travelled on Epstein's plane.

She also spoke glowingly of Britain's Prince Andrew and dismissed as “rubbish” the late Virginia Giuffre's claim that she was paid to have a relationship with Andrew and that he had sex with her at Maxwell's London home.

“That would've been the only time that I think that President Clinton could have even received a massage,” Maxwell said. “And he didn't, because I was there.”

Maxwell sought to distance herself from Epstein's conduct, repeatedly denying allegations made during her trial about her role. Though she acknowledged that at one point Epstein began preferring younger women, she insisted she never understood that to “encompass children”.

“I did see from when I met him, he was involved or -- involved or friends with or whatever, however you want to characterise it, with women who were in their 20s,” she told Blanche. “And then the slide to, you know, or younger looking women. But I never considered that this would encompass criminal behaviour.”

Epstein was arrested in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges, accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, and was found dead a month later in a New York jail cell in what investigators described as a suicide.

The saga has consumed the Trump administration following a two-page announcement from the FBI and Justice Department last month that Epstein had killed himself despite conspiracy theories to the contrary, that a “client list” that Attorney General Pam Bondi had intimated was on her desk did not actually exist, and that no additional documents from the high-profile investigation were suitable to be released.

The announcement produced outrage from conspiracy theorists, online sleuths and Trump supporters who had been hoping to see proof of a government coverup.

That expectation was driven in part by comments from officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who on podcasts before taking their current positions had repeatedly promoted the idea that damaging details about prominent people were being withheld.

Patel, for instance, said in at least one podcast interview before becoming director that Epstein's “black book” was under the “direct control of the director of the FBI.”

The administration had an early stumble in February when far-right influencers were invited to the White House in February and provided by Bondi with binders marked “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “Declassified” that contained documents that had largely already been in the public domain.

After the first release fell flat, Bondi said officials were poring over a “truckload” of previously withheld evidence she said had been handed over by the FBI and raised expectations of forthcoming releases.

But after a weekslong review of evidence in the government's possession, the Justice Department determined that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”

The department noted that much of the material was placed under seal by a court to protect victims and “only a fraction” of it “would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial.”

Faced with fury from his base, Trump sought to quickly turn the page, shutting down questioning of Bondi about Epstein at a White House Cabinet meeting and deriding as “weaklings” supporters who he said were falling for the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”

The Justice Department has responded to a subpoena from House lawmakers by pledging to turn over information.