Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend and longtime confidante now serving a 20-year sentence, told Justice Department investigators she never witnessed any sexually inappropriate interactions with Donald Trump, according to records released Friday meant to distance the Republican president from the disgraced financer.
The Trump administration issued transcripts from interviews that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche conducted with Ghislaine Maxwell last month as the administration was scrambling to present itself as transparent amid a fierce backlash over an earlier refusal to disclose a trove of records from the sex-trafficking case.
The records show Maxwell repeatedly showering Trump with praise and denying under questioning from Blanche that she had observed Trump engaged in any form of sexual behavior.
The administration was presumably eager to make such denials public at a time when the president has faced questions about a long-ago friendship with Epstein and as his administration has endured continued scrutiny over its handling of evidence from the case.
The transcript release represents the latest Trump administration effort to repair self-inflicted political wounds after failing to deliver on expectations that its own officials had created through conspiracy theories and bold pronouncements that never came to pass.
