The Trump administration’s recent approach to Ghislaine Maxwell has been bizarre. After transferring Jeffrey Epstein’s former confidante to a minimum-security prison — a radical move in its own right, given that she was convicted of sex trafficking — Maxwell sat down for an unusual interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former personal defense attorney.
Late last week, as my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin reported, the administration released transcripts and audio recordings of the interview and — wouldn’t you know it? — Maxwell said exactly what the White House wanted to hear. “I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody,” she said. “In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”
Given that Maxwell seems to be desperately looking for a Trump pardon, her comments were difficult to accept at face value. That said, for House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, it apparently wasn’t obvious at all.
“This confirms what we all knew,” Jordan told Fox News the day after the transcript was released. “We knew President Trump didn’t do anything wrong here. He said that repeatedly. This transcript is the whole transcript, and it confirms that. So I think there’s nothing there, it seems, based on what we got from the interview of Ms. Maxwell.”
There are a couple of problems here.
The first is Jordan’s eagerness to trust the word of a convicted sex trafficker who is looking for a pardon. I can appreciate why Trump’s sycophantic allies are eager to make the Epstein scandal go away, but to pretend that Maxwell has credibility and her claims should be accepted at face value is ridiculous.
The second problem is that Jordan isn’t exactly the Republican Party’s best messenger on this issue. After all, as NBC News reported over the course of several years, the right-wing congressman was accused of turning a blind eye to sexual misconduct targeting student athletes at Ohio State during Jordan’s tenure as an assistant coach.
The congressman has repeatedly said he didn’t know about the abuses, but given the nature of the controversy, maybe the GOP should send out someone else to tout Maxwell’s claims in the Epstein scandal?
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