A reporter who has been covering the Jeffrey Epstein case for more than a decade said on Monday that it appears the government doesn’t fully grasp the case.
Julie K. Brown of The Miami Herald joined The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles on the publication’s podcast to discuss the case. Her comments come at a time when Trump administration officials have met with Epstein’s former accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, multiple times. Some experts have speculated that Trump may offer Maxwell a pardon in exchange for her providing damaging information or testimony against Trump’s political enemies.
Coles asked Brown what she thought about the Justice Department sending Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and one of Trump’s former criminal defense attorneys, to talk with Maxwell and her lawyers.
“I thought that it’s a little too late, to be honest with you,” Brown said. “I don’t know why the Justice Department didn’t find out what she had before.”
Epstein and Maxwell were convicted of child sex trafficking charges in 2019 during Trump’s first administration. Epstein died in custody while awaiting trial. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in the scheme.
During the trial, prosecutors proved that Maxwell lied to them repeatedly.
Now, it appears the Department of Justice views Maxwell as a truth-teller who was politically prosecuted.
“This case is very, very complicated, and you really have to know everything that she has said previously in order to gauge whether what she’s saying now is consistent with what she has said in the past,” Brown said.
“And I sense from everything that’s happened under the Trump administration, that they have not fully looked at this case and the history the way they should, or they wouldn’t have been stuck with binders full of dated material that they released as if it was some big new information dump here,” she continued.