What makes Todd Blanche's potential meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell so unusual [View all]

What makes Todd Blanche’s potential meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell so unusual
Prosecutors meet with potential cooperators all the time. This is not a normal instance of that.

July 22, 2025, 2:49 PM EDT
By Jordan Rubin


(MSNBC) It’s not unusual for prosecutors to meet with criminal defendants who may have valuable information to trade for beneficial treatment. But we may be witnessing one of the stranger instances of this phenomenon unfolding in real time, with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announcing Tuesday that he intends to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Blanche, one of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers who are now running the Justice Department in close coordination with the president, wrote on X:

Link to tweet

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Maxwell is in prison after a jury found her guilty in 2021 of conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors. She and Epstein were both charged during the first Trump administration. Maxwell currently has a release date in 2037, and she has a pending petition with the Supreme Court to try to overturn her conviction. The Justice Department opposed her petition just last week, and we don’t know yet whether the high court will take up her appeal; we may hear from the court about that in the fall.

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At the risk of stating the obvious, the 63-year-old Maxwell probably wants to avoid spending the next decade-plus in prison. Blanche probably wants to use the tools of the justice system to help Trump politically, like the DOJ tried to do in the Eric Adams case, for example.

If those are the incentives, then the question becomes: How do Maxwell and Blanche work together to help Trump? ..................(more)

https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/ghislaine-maxwell-blanche-meeting-doj-epstein-trump-rcna220219