A lawyer fact-checked one of President Donald Trump’s more outlandish claims during a press conference on Tuesday.
Trump was asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins whether he knew of or approved disgraced Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to a minimum security prison in a residential area of Texas. Trump denied both and claimed to learn about the event from the news. Trump added that Maxwell’s move was not uncommon.
The last claim stunned Ryan Goodman, the former special counsel at the Department of Defense and a law professor at NYU. Goodman corrected Trump on CNN’s “OutFront” with anchor Erin Burnett.
“This had to be approved by someone very senior at the Bureau of Prisons,” Goodman said. “It’s so unusual. Look, President Trump should have just said, ‘We’re dealing with an unusual situation, so something unusual happened.’ That would be one way of approaching it.”
“What he said is just not plausible,” Goodman continued. “And it is so unusual that you would hope the Justice Department would have informed him that he would not learn about it in the news.”
Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years for child sex trafficking charges in 2022. Goodman said it is “uncommon” for an offender such as Maxwell to be moved out of the maximum security prison where she was housed, especially considering the high-profile nature of her case.
“It’s such an extraordinary step taken with a very high-profile convict,” Goodman said.