Mother Jones illustration; Laura Cavanaugh/Getty; Wikipedia
One of the oddest occurrences in the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein imbroglio was the trip that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, took in July to Tallahassee, Florida, to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s serving a 20-year sentence for procuring underage girls, some as young as 14, for Epstein to sexually abuse. Prior to being nominated by Trump to the No. 2 position in the Justice Department, Blanche was Trump’s criminal attorney in the porn-star-hush-money-forged-business-records case in New York, in which Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts.
Blanche never provided a compelling explanation for this unprecedented act. Why was Trump’s former personal lawyer and a top Justice Department official meeting with a sex offender whom the US government had previously assailed for her “willingness to lie brazenly under oath about her conduct”? Legal observers scratched their heads over this. Months later, Blanche said, “The point of the interview was to allow her to speak, which nobody had done before.” That didn’t make much sense. How often does the deputy attorney general fly 900 miles to afford a convicted sex offender a chance to chat? It was as if Blanche was trying to create fodder for conspiracy theorists.
What made all this even stranger is that after their tete-a-tete, Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security, women-only, federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, that houses mainly nonviolent offenders and white collar crooks. This facility—home to disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star and fraduster Jen Shah—is a much cushier facility than the co-ed Tallahassee prison.
When the transfer was first reported in August, the Bureau of Prisons refused to explain the reason for the move, which Epstein abuse survivors protested. So I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the BOP asking for information related to this relocation. Specifically:
all records mentioning or referencing Maxwell’s transfer to Federal Prison Camp Byran. This includes emails, memoranda, transfer orders, phone messages, texts, electronic chats, and any other communications, whether internal to BOP or between BOP personnel and any other governmental or nongovernmental personnel
Guess what? The BOP did not jump to and provide the information. After a months-long delay, the agency noted it would take up to nine months to fulfill this request.
We are suing. That is, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal assistance to journalists, today filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington, DC, on behalf of the Center for Investigative Reporting (which publishes Mother Jones), to compel the BOP to provide the relevant records. The filing notes that the BOP violated the Freedom of Information Act by initially failing to respond in a timely manner.
We’re not the only ones after this information. In August, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) sent a letter to William Marshall III, the BOP director, requesting similar material. “Against the backdrop of the political scandal arising from President Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Ms.Maxwell’s abrupt transfer raises questions about whether she has been given special treatment in exchange for political favors,” he wrote. Whitehouse asked for a response within three weeks. He received no reply—and, along with Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), filed a FOIA request.
In November, a whistleblower notified Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee that at Camp Bryan Maxwell was receiving preferential treatment that included customized meals brought to her cell, private meetings with visitors (who were permitted to bring in computers), email services through the warden’s office, after-hours use of the prison gym, and access to a puppy (that was being trained as a service dog). That month, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the senior Democrat on the committee, wrote Trump requesting that Blanche appear before the committee to answer questions about Maxwell’s treatment. That has not happened.
Given the intense public interest in the Epstein case—and the scrutiny it deserves—there ought to be no need to go to court to obtain this information about Maxwell. But with Trump’s Justice Department brazenly violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated a release of the federal government’s Epstein records by December 19 (by which time only 1 percent of the cache had been made public), it’s no shocker that the Bureau of Prisons has not been more forthcoming regarding Maxwell’s prison upgrade.
Our in-house counsel, Victoria Baranetsky, says, “At a time when public trust in institutions is fragile, FOIA remains essential. Our lawsuit seeks to enforce the public’s right to know and to ensure that the government lives up to its obligation of transparency.” And Gunita Singh, a staff attorney for RCFP notes, “We’re proud to represent CIR and look forward to enforcing FOIA’s transparency mandate with respect to the actions of law enforcement in this matter.”
When might we get anything out of BOP? No idea. But we’ll keep you posted, and you can keep track of the case at this page.