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LAST UPDATE | 27 Jul 2025
THERE IS A growing sense, in both legal and political circles, that US President Donald Trump, usually so adroit when it comes to whipping up and sating the appetites of his MAGA base, is powerless to contain the biggest crisis of his political career.
Despite his best efforts to deflect attention from calls for the release of the Epstein files – lobbing everything from claims of treason by Obama to Coca-Cola’s alleged willingness to change its recipe at his behest – his base is proving resistant to the sort of switch and bait that has invariably succeed in the past.
As Trump prepared to depart for a five-day trip to the United Kingdom on Friday, he told reporters he hasn’t thought about giving a pardon or a commutation to Ghislaine Maxwell. “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s not something I have thought about,” he added.
Even referencing the prospect of a pardon is likely to add more fuel to the conspiracy theory flames he’s been fanning. If his MAGA base is outraged by his abrupt U-turn over previous claims of a deep state coverup of the Epstein scandal, Democrats are now crying foul over meetings between Maxwell and Todd Blanche, Trump’s criminal defence lawyer turned deputy attorney general. “It stinks of high corruption,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. The fact Maxwell’s lawyer, David Oscar Markus, is a longtime associate and friend of Blanche’s will do little to quell mistrust in how the crisis is being handled.
Maxwell is the former partner and co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious paedophile who was found dead in his prison cell while awaiting trial on a slew of sex offences. Following her 2021 conviction, she is just three years into a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking and conspiring to sexually abuse minors. She has two avenues to an early release – and both run through the White House.
As of Friday evening, the Department of Justice continued to oppose her appeal to the Supreme Court, disputing her claim that a 2007 plea deal between Jeffrey Epstein and federal prosecutors in Florida should have shielded her from criminal charges in New York. If Trump orders the Department of Justice not to oppose Maxwell’s bid for a Supreme Court appeal, it’s theoretically possible that her conviction may be overturned. Alternatively, Trump could issue a pardon or commute her sentence at some point before the end of his second term.
So while her lawyer insists she has ‘no reason to lie at this point’, Maxwell has good reason not to antagonise Trump. And even though Democrats are applauding themselves for forcing James Comer, the Republican Chair of the House Oversight Committee, to subpoena Maxwell to answer questions on 11 August, her credibility as a witness is compromised by her own self-interest.
It’s a point made by House Speaker Mike Johnson after he sent the House on what has been dubbed ‘the Epstein Recess’. “If they see fit to bring in Ghislaine Maxwell for testimony, that’s fine,” he told reporters. “I will note the obvious concern – 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.”
That the Republican House Speaker was impugning Maxwell’s credibility even as Trump’s Deputy Attorney General was camped out in Tallahassee for two days of meetings with her is a measure of how disconnected the Republicans are in their attempts to contain this crisis.
Now well into its third week, it has riveted and perplexed Washington in roughly equal measure. Much of the blame has been laid at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s door.
During a Fox News interview in February, Bondi indicated she had the ‘client list’ on her desk for review. But earlier this month, the Department of Justice issued a statement denying the existence of a client list. It concluded that Epstein had died by suicide and said no further files would be released, unleashing a MAGA maelstrom that caught Trump off guard.
And the hits kept coming. In the midst of the furore, the Wall Street Journal published a report claiming a seedy birthday message and drawing by Trump was included in a leather-bound book of messages from friends to commemorate Epstein’s 50th Birthday. Trump responded furiously, issuing a $10 billion defamation action naming the WSJ, NewsCorp, Rupert Murdoch and the reporters who wrote the story.
A few days later, the WSJ reported that Trump had been advised by Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in May that his name appeared in the Epstein files, along with the names of other politicians and well-known figures from the worlds of politics, finance and entertainment. This report has been confirmed by several other media outlets. And on Friday, the New York Times produced a copy of what it says is an introductory letter written by Ghislaine Maxwell to Epstein’s Birthday Book.
That Trump’s name would appear several times in a 300-gigabyte trawl through Epstein’s life is not surprising. And its inclusion is no indication that he is guilty of criminal behaviour.
The question then, that bedevils friends and foes alike, is why he’s going to such lengths to renege on his election campaign promise to release the files. It’s already public knowledge, largely through photos, videos and Trump’s own admissions, that he and Epstein were friends for at least 15 years. They attended parties, restaurant openings and modelling events together. Epstein and Maxwell socialised with Trump in New York and Palm Beach.
Epstein attended Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples, and Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet on at least eight occasions, including one trip with his second wife and their young daughter. In a 2002 New York Magazine profile of Epstein, Trump acknowledged that he had known him for about 15 years and pronounced him a ‘terrific guy’ who was ‘a lot of fun to be with’ before concluding “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” At the time of his remarks, Trump was 56 years old and Epstein was 49.
The association with Trump went back to the late 1980s; Epstein told the author Michael Wolff that Trump was his closest friend for 15 years and claimed he introduced Trump to his third wife, Melania Knauss. For more than a decade he and Maxwell were frequent guests at Mar-A-Lago.
It was at Mar-A-Lago that Maxwell recruited Virginia Roberts, a 15-year-old locker room attendant. In February 2022, Roberts brought a civil sexual assault case against Prince Andrew, claimed she was trafficked to England and forced to have sex with the Prince as a 17-year-old teenager. Roberts, whose married name was Virginia Giuffre, died by suicide in May this year.
David Aronberg, who served as state attorney for Palm Beach County for 12 years until his departure earlier this year is dismissive of both Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit and Bondi’s request to judges in Florida and New York to unseal the grand jury transcripts as so much smoke and mirrors, and likely futile attempts to contain the MAGA conflagration they have ignited.
The Wall Street Journal defamation lawsuit is legal theatre, performed for the court of public opinion rather than a court of law. Trump, he says, would never subject himself to the rigours of a sworn deposition and the discovery process where every aspect of his friendship with Epstein would be subjected to forensic examination by Murdoch’s lawyers.
Of Bondi’s request to courts in Florida and New York to unseal grand jury testimony, he notes that a Florida judge has already turned down her request, and the New York courts may do likewise. And even if the courts did grant all or part of her requests, ‘we’re talking about a portion of a portion,’ he says, since Bondi would ultimately get to decide what was ‘pertinent’ for public consumption.
“It wouldn’t include the larger file, and it won’t provide what the MAGA base is clamouring for. They want a client list and they want proof that Epstein was murdered,” he added.
There’s a sense on Capitol Hill that Trump has both created and fed this monster, by shamelessly exploiting the scandal for political purposes during the 2024 campaign and then by appointing unqualified conspiracy theorists to the top positions within the FBI.
Throughout the 2024 campaign Trump and his surrogates – including current Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino – stoked and fuelled claims that Epstein was murdered to prevent him from implicating powerful Democrats and liberal elites who were part of his sex trafficking ring. Trump repeatedly promised to release all the Epstein files, including what he claimed was a ‘client list’ of Epstein’s co-conspirators that he said had been concealed by the Biden administration.
It’s unclear how much credence the MAGA base, which has always believed that any conspiracy was intended to protect liberal elites like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates from investigation, would grant to Maxwell’s newly minted version of events.
Even if Maxwell’s 11 August appearance before the House Oversight Committee yields no new information, it will provide the necessary oxygen to keep the scandal – and the allegations of a cover-up – alive. So will Bondi’s scheduled appearance before the House Judiciary Committee in late August. Committee member and Republican renegade Thomas Massie is one of her fiercest critics and has pledged to keep pushing for a floor vote to release all the files.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
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