Influential MAGA voices are suddenly trying to cast Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking accomplice in a more favorable light.

The Justice Department is reportedly meeting with Maxwell on Thursday and Friday, ahead of her scheduled deposition with the House Oversight Committee on August 11. The interviews follow weeks of mounting pressure on Trump from his base, who have clamored for more transparency regarding the Epstein files after the Justice Department contradicted prior statements from Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed client list.

Offering Maxwell as fodder to Trump’s hungry followers is a fascinating carrot-and-stick option to alleviate some of that tension, but convincing her to talk would almost certainly require some kind of deal—an option that pro-Trump conservative media networks started to imagine this week.

On Monday, Newsmax host Greg Kelly had already started to dabble in the new media line, suggesting on air that Maxwell didn’t deserve her 20-year prison sentence and openly embracing the idea that the Epstein associate could be wrongly convicted.

"And maybe she deserves it. Maybe she doesn’t. Again, not a very popular thing, but we’ll take a look,” Kelly told his viewers, even questioning if the child sex abuser had been legally tried in court. (She was.)

"She just might be a victim. She just might be,” Kelly said.

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse as Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and associate.

"Maybe she wants immunity, maybe she wants some sort of protection, I don’t know,” Charlie Kirk said on his show Tuesday. “We just want the truth.… Some people say, ‘Can we trust Ghislaine Maxwell?’ Probably, but also probably not.”

  • Boddhisatva@lemmy.world
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    24 hours ago

    We just want the truth, and we want that truth so badly that we’re willing to let a child rapist (Maxwell) get a pardon in exchange for what will at best be a partial list of Epstein’s clients and at worst will be a list of Trump’s enemies that may or may not have had anything to do with Epstein.