WASHINGTON — President Trump claimed Monday he has not been asked to pardon Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell — and revealed that he rejected an offer to visit the notorious pedophile’s private island.
Maxwell, 63, sat for two days of questioning with Justice Department officials Thursday and Friday, with her attorney claiming she fielded queries about “100 different people” associated with her and Epstein, who was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell on Aug. 10, 2019, while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
While some have speculated Maxwell’s cooperation is a ploy to shorten her 20-year sentence, Trump told reporters at his Turnberry resort in Scotland that her attorneys have not yet asked for clemency.
“Nobody’s approached me with it. Nobody’s asked me about it,” the president said, after reiterating that he’s “allowed to give her a pardon.”
Maxwell attorney David Oscar Markus told reporters Friday that the president was “the ultimate dealmaker” and he hoped Trump exercises the pardon power “in a right and just way.”
Epstein and Trump, 79, were on friendly terms through the 1990s and early 2000s, with the president the two fell out after the notorious financier “stole people that worked for me.”
“For years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein, for years, because he did something that was inappropriate,” Trump said.
“By the way, I never went to the island,” the president added moments later, referring to Epstein’s Little Saint James in the US Virgin Islands.
“I never had the privilege of going to his island — and I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down, I didn’t want to go to his island.”
Trump has repeatedly downplayed the the Epstein case, despite bipartisan questioning of a July 6 Justice Department and FBI memo that found the 66-year-old committed suicide in his cell and did not keep a “client list” of cohorts who engaged in illicit sex with girls as young as 14.
“I haven’t been overly interested in it, you know, it’s a hoax that’s been built up way beyond proportion,” he said. “Those files were run by the worst scum on earth. They were run by [former FBI Director James] Comey, they were run by [former Attorney General Merrick] Garland, they were run by [former President Joe] Biden.”
Asked about reporting that his name was included in investigative files on the case, Trump claimed “they could easily put something in the files that’s a phony.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi stoked interest in the Epstein case back in February when she suggested during a Fox News interview that the release of the “client list” was imminent — only to later claim to be referring to the case files.
Bondi has also claimed the files contain voluminous amounts of child pornography in Epstein’s possession and vowed those will never be released.
