Mother Jones Sues the Bureau of Prisons for Ghislaine Maxwell Records |
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........