What did Donald Trump do today?

He got offered a particularly tempting bribe (and didn't turn it down).

Ghislaine Maxwell was Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirator in the massive child sex trafficking operation they ran together. She was not a hands-off facilitator: rather, victims have testified that she groomed, seduced, threatened, and raped them personally.

Trump has shown extraordinary generosity towards Maxwell, who is currently serving a twenty-year federal prison sentence. He recently had her moved to a resort-style minimum-security facility where she can enjoy private visiting privileges (complete with complimentary snacks for her guests), unmonitored internet access, and sessions training puppies to work as therapy dogs. Under the Bureau of Prison's rules for any other convict, Maxwell—as a felon convicted of heinous sexual crimes against children—would never be permitted any of these perks, or to be transferred to a minimum security facility in the first place. But Trump, acting through his former defense attorney and current deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, made it happen after Maxwell gave a prison interview in which she declined to implicate Trump in criminal activity.

Trump—who has openly insulted literally thousands of Americans by name—is so considerate of Maxwell's feelings that he won't even publicly express any negative sentiments about her, not even after her convictions. Instead, he has only repeatedly said that he "wishes her well" and implied that the only real criminal was her "boyfriend" Epstein.

That much is old news. But today, there were two new developments. The first is that Maxwell escalated her campaign to get Trump to pardon her or commute her sentence, explicitly offering to testify to Trump's innocence if and only if he grants her clemency. 

Her lawyer made this statement today, after she invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before a Congressional panel: "Ms. Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump."

She's chosen her moment strategically: Trump is desperate to get out from under the mounting scandal of his name appearing tens of thousands of times in the DOJ's investigative files. Worse for Trump, members of Congress are now getting access to the unredacted files, and some—including members of his own party—are threatening to expose Epstein and Maxwell's criminally implicated associates. 

This is the bind that Trump is in: even if he didn't personally rape or abuse children, he's admitted to his political allies that his "friends" are implicated, and that he's trying to protect their interests. But in doing so, he's made himself look incredibly suspicious. Maxwell's testimony clearing him of direct wrongdoing, however obvious bought-off, might help him in that regard. 

Under normal circumstances, any politician offered such an obviously corrupt bargain for a declaration of innocence about crimes they were actually innocent of would renounce it at full volume. Neither Trump nor any spokesperson has done anything today to even hint that they will be rejecting Maxwell's offer. In fact, he's always been very careful not to rule out the possibility that he might free her from prison.

The second new development comes from those files. It shows that in 2006, Trump was telling a very different story about Maxwell, calling her "evil" in a police report and saying that "everyone knew" what she and Epstein were up to. That makes the fact that his close association with both of them continued for years afterwards—and his sudden tenderness towards Maxwell—vastly more damning.

The result of that mid-2000s investigation, in which Trump played no significant part, was a scandalously lenient plea deal signed off on by then-District Attorney Alex Acosta. When Trump took office in 2017, he appointed Acosta his Secretary of Labor. 

 

Why does this matter?

• There is absolutely no reason to even consider this kind of naked corrupt bargain from a heinous criminal for an instant that doesn't involve Trump being guilty, complicit, blackmailed, or protecting people who are. 

• Nobody that Ghislaine Maxwell has anything to offer can be trusted with the power of the presidency.