The Problem With Ghislaine Maxwell As a Witness

How could anybody trust her now?

- Elie Honig

WHEN I WAS A federal prosecutor with the Southern District of New York, I worked with all manner of frightful cooperating witnesses—fraudsters, gangsters, killers—and even I can't imagine a scenario in which the U.S. Department of Justice comes to a legitimate deal with Ghislaine Maxwell.

But that's the Trump administration's latest volley in its frantic effort to quell the uproar from the president's base over what is, or is not, hidden in government files about the late convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s a flawed plan but perhaps an understandable one for Trump's cronies to have seized on amid a crisis they have brought on themselves. Virtually as soon as she became U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi started dangling the public release of more salacious and damning material about Epstein, previewing the existence of a “client list” (telling Fox News in February that it was “sitting on my desk right now”) and feuding openly with FBI director Kash Patel—himself a former loud Epstein conspiracy theorist—whose agency she accused of withholding files on the case. Both the FBI and the DoJ spent months making hundreds of employees comb through records to find evidence of a cover-up, elite involvement in child trafficking, or an alternative tale about Epstein's death, only for Bondi to announce in July that after “an exhaustive review,” there was no new information or client list and the case should be closed with no further public disclosures or criminal charges. All hell broke loose, and the DoJ has since changed its tune.