The U.S. Justice Department on Friday released transcripts of interviews conducted with Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, in what appeared to be an attempt by President Donald Trump administration to project transparency following backlash over its earlier refusal to disclose key records from the sex-trafficking case.
The transcripts detail two days of questioning by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche at a Florida courthouse last month, during which Maxwell recalled knowing about Donald Trump and possibly meeting him for the first time in 1990, when her father, media mogul Robert Maxwell, owned the New York Daily News, according to AP.
“I may have met Donald Trump at that time, because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript.
“She added that her father was also fond of Trump’s then-wife, Ivana, “because she was also from Czechoslovakia, where my dad was from.”
Maxwell, once a British socialite, was convicted in 2021 of helping Epstein lure underage girls to be sexually abused.
Following the interviews, she was moved from a low-security federal prison in Florida, where she had been serving a 20-year sentence, to a minimum-security camp in Texas.
Neither her lawyer nor the Bureau of Prisons provided an explanation for the transfer.
The release of the interview transcripts comes amid efforts by the Trump administration to contain political damage over the handling of the Epstein case.
Officials had previously fuelled speculation that sensitive evidence, including what some referred to as a “client list”, would be made public, but later announced that such records did not exist.
In July, the FBI and Justice Department issued a terse two-page statement asserting that Epstein had died by suicide in 2019 and that no additional documents from the case were suitable for release.
The move ignited outrage among conspiracy theorists, online investigators and Trump supporters, many of whom believed they had been promised evidence of a cover-up.
FBI Director Kash Patel and senior administration official Dan Bongino had, before assuming their current posts, frequently suggested on podcasts that Epstein’s “black book” was being deliberately withheld.
Patel had even claimed in one interview that it was under the “direct control of the director of the FBI,” AP reports.
The administration had already stumbled earlier this year when Attorney General Pam Bondi provided far-right influencers invited to the White House with binders marked “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “Declassified.”
The binders, however, largely contained documents already in the public domain.
Bondi later raised expectations further, stating that officials were reviewing a “truckload” of previously withheld evidence purportedly handed over by the FBI.
Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier with high-profile social connections that included Prince Andrew, former President Bill Clinton and Trump, was arrested in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking minors.
He was accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls before being found dead in his Manhattan jail cell a month later, in what investigators described as suicide.
The Maxwell transcripts mark the latest public disclosure in a case that has fueled years of speculation, conspiracy theories, and political controversy.
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