CNN senior authorized analyst Elie Honig expressed severe skepticism over claims made by Ghislaine Maxwell within the just-released transcripts of her interview with the Division of Justice.
Maxwell, at the moment serving a 20-year jail sentence for serving to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage women, is looking for a pardon from President Donald Trump and sang his praises in her interview with Deputy Lawyer Basic Todd Blanche final month.
Requested Friday on CNN’s “The Lead” whether or not he discovered Maxwell’s account “credible,” Honig responded, “Oh my gosh, no,” earlier than explaining what he discovered odd about her take.
“On this transcript, Ghislaine Maxwell gives a merely weird worldview whereby nearly no person did something improper,” Honig mentioned. “She doesn’t even really implicate Jeffrey Epstein.”
Maxwell, he went on, “mainly says” within the transcripts that she doesn’t “have any information” of Epstein’s alleged crimes, and likewise maintains that she herself “is totally 100% harmless.”
The DOJ’s chat with Maxwell got here amid rising public outrage over the Trump administration’s resistance to releasing recordsdata associated to the investigation into Epstein, who was accused of working a intercourse trafficking ring involving minors. Epstein, who pleaded guilty in 2008 to expenses in Florida of soliciting intercourse from a minor, died in jail in 2019 whereas going through federal intercourse trafficking expenses.
In latest weeks, Trump has confronted renewed scrutiny over his years of friendship with Epstein and Maxwell. In the transcripts released Friday, Maxwell claimed Trump and Epstein weren’t “shut associates,” and mentioned she “by no means witnessed” Trump in “any inappropriate setting in any manner.”
The convicted intercourse trafficker additionally mentioned Trump was “all the time very cordial and really variety” and made a degree to notice her admiration for his “extraordinary achievement in changing into the president now.”
Maxwell additionally said that former president Invoice Clinton “completely by no means went” to Epstein’s infamous non-public island and had no “impartial friendship” with Epstein.
On CNN, Honig mentioned he was “really shocked” to see that Maxwell didn’t “implicate anyone” within the interview.
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“Even when a juror was to take the whole lot on this transcript as true, there can be no person else to cost or convict with something,” he mentioned. “But one more reason why I’m simply not shopping for this.”
