President Donald Trump has backed himself into a deep corner on the Jeffrey Epstein case, according to one analyst.
Former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman argued in a recent op-ed for The New York Times that Trump’s obsession with loyalty could make it more difficult for him to keep his base together as he tries to distance himself from the Epstein saga. Trump’s demand that federal officials like the F.B.I. Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi sell the base a baseless story about Epstein to MAGA is a prime example, Richman argued.
Last month, federal officials released an unsigned memo that contradicted parts of the Epstein story that Trump and his surrogates spun for multiple years. The memo said Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial, and that he never kept a list of clients.
To sell that story, Richman argued that Trump’s officials need to have credibility with the MAGA base. However, publishing the unsigned memo wiped away any chances of that happening.
“The unavoidable problem for the Trump administration is how it has poisoned the well it now wants to draw from,” Richman wrote.
Now, it appears Trump is ready to align himself with someone who has even less credibility than his Department of Justice.
Trump’s Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, has met with Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell multiple times in recent weeks. Some experts suggest that Trump may be dangling a pardon in front of Maxwell in exchange for damaging testimony against Trump’s political enemies.
Maxwell was convicted of child sex trafficking in 2022 and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Maxwell also lied under oath multiple times in an attempt to avoid taking accountability for her actions, prosecutors alleged.
“Say she is willing to speak about a wide range of new matters, maybe involving the president. What confidence should we have that Trump Justice Department officials will push her hard to be truthful and candid?” Richman argued. “Or that they will report back everything she said?
“The answer to the last set of questions is probably ‘none,’” he continued.