BRYAN, Texas ― Donald Trump since returning to the White House has pardoned fraudsters, money launderers, cop-assaulters, a drug kingpin who smuggled 400 tons of cocaine into the United States ― so why not a notorious child sex trafficker?
As the traditional Christmas pardoning season approaches, residents of the town surrounding a now-famous women’s prison camp wonder if Trump might dare release the most notorious child trafficker alive: Ghislaine Maxwell, accomplice of the late Jeffrey Epstein.
“If the president releases her, it would be a slap in the face to the entire justice system,” said Emily Trull, a 27-year-old life insurance saleswoman and Trump voter who thinks the fact that Maxwell is even at Federal Prison Camp Bryan, rather than a “real” prison, is already a travesty.
Kelly Allen, 41 and a legal secretary in the local Brazos County district attorney’s office, said the community is still not over Maxwell’s middle-of-the-night arrival there four months ago. “People were shocked,” she said, adding that setting her free entirely would be even worse. “I think it would not be good.”
Trump himself has repeatedly and notably refused to rule out freeing his longtime friend. White House aides have also not ruled it out. The Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons did not respond to HuffPost queries about Maxwell over a period of many weeks.
