New Republican writer Greg Sargent penned a Monday column alleging that President Donald Trump is “humiliating” MAGA with his comments over the scandal involving trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaking in the United Kingdom on Monday, Trump again claimed that the Epstein scandal is nothing but a hoax, claiming that if his name was in the files, then former President Joe Biden would have already released the files.
Meanwhile, Sargent pointed to Trump’s comments on Friday before he left for his golf club in Scotland.
“I’m allowed to do it,” Trump said when asked if he would pardon Epstein’s convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Trump’s former lawyer, Todd Blanche, visited a Jacksonville, Florida, courthouse on Thursday and Friday to question Maxwell personally, but he claimed it was in his capacity as the Deputy Attorney General.
Writing for The Bulwark, however, Philip Rotner, said that the move by Blanche is sketchy and looks to be motivated by protecting Trump.
Rotner thinks it’s “plausible” that Blanche could endeavor to get Maxwell to exonerate Trump in exchange for a pardon.
“It’s hard to overstate how humiliating all this is for MAGA,” wrote Sargent. “After demanding the ‘Epstein files’ for years, they got their people in at the Justice Department—and now they’re taking new steps to cover it all up.”
Meanwhile, Sargent noted, some in MAGA world “are telling themselves that Maxwell will finally reveal the whole truth.” It is something that makes them look “more absurd.”
“I think what he is supposed to be talking to her about is to see if there is any information she can provide [that indicates] complicity by anyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s really despicable conduct with young women,” Rotner said. “After all, these girls were trafficked. Epstein was accused of trafficking, and Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking. They must have been trafficked to somebody. And one would suppose that Maxwell would have a lot of information about to whom these girls were trafficked.”
“He is Trump’s lawyer. He says even recently that he continues to have an attorney-client relationship with Donald Trump,” Rotner recalled. “He not only was Trump’s lawyer but he also reports to Donald Trump now. And he’s the one who’s going out to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell to unearth evidence that clearly involves Donald Trump—at least as a witness and maybe even as a subject. So, it just seems completely phony, and any pretext that there’s a real investigation going on, I think, is just that.”
And already Rotner thinks that Maxwell is starting to adopt some of Trump’s language about an “unfair” trial and that there were broken promises from prosecutors. “They’re setting up what I would call a quasi-legal argument— that there was something wrong with her conviction and that Trump can and should remedy that by a commutation or pardon or something of that ilk.
Sargent thinks it is likely MAGA will buy such an excuse if Trump pardons Maxwell.
“So is there a scenario where that does happen: Trump pardons Maxwell; Maxwell exonerates Trump; the “Justice Department” closes everything down and they just hunker down and ride it out,” he said, describing it as a grim future.