Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend and associate, has reemerged in recent days as a pivotal figure in what the White House hopes will be the cure for the threat to President Donald Trump’s relationship with his base. 

Trump’s Department of Justice has been met with bipartisan fallout over how it has managed the release of the Epstein files, which seek to shed more light on a figure viewed by many in the president’s base as a shadowy figure emblematic of the deep state’s elitist control over domestic and international issues. 

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Maxwell, a Manhattan-London society figure, spent decades as Epstein’s partner before the New York financier pleaded guilty as a sex offender and later died in jail in 2019. Maxwell cried foul when she underwent her own criminal trials for sex trafficking charges related to facilitating Epstein’s crimes that resulted in a twenty-year prison sentence in 2022, arguing that it violated a 2007 plea deal the financier made with federal prosecutors in which the government agreed not to prosecute any of his co-conspirators.

This week, the Department of Justice, led by Pam Bondi, signaled it views Maxwell as the human link that could explain the Epstein saga and help stem the tide of anger against Trump. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche revealed on Tuesday that the DOJ and FBI want to sit down with Maxwell and “hear what she has to say.” The move could mark a sweeping reversal of fortunes for Maxwell after the DOJ earlier this spring opposed her appeal to the Supreme Court, in which she sought a review of her case due to arguments that the government’s non-prosecution agreement with Epstein also applied to her. 

Maxwell’s attorney, David Markus, told CNN Tuesday morning: “I can confirm that we are in discussions with the government and that Ghislaine will always testify truthfully. We are grateful to President Trump for his commitment to uncovering the truth in this case.”

As Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) and the House Oversight Committee plan to subpoena Maxwell in hopes of forcing her to testify to lawmakers regarding what she knows about Epstein, she is rumored to be agreeable to speaking to the Trump administration, on certain conditions. 

Substack journalist Jessica Reed Kraus, who is closely connected with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA agenda and covered Maxwell’s trials in 2021 and 2022, reported in July that Epstein’s ex-girlfriend is “willing and eager” to cooperate with the Trump administration, “but only if guaranteed a pardon or commutation.” 

“Yes, she’s working on a pardon — seems to believe that because she ‘supports Trump,’ she’ll get clemency,” one of Maxwell’s fellow prison inmates reportedly told Kraus in another post earlier this month. 

Maxwell’s positioning comes after her lawyer slammed the White House for opposing her appeal to the Supreme Court in July, saying he’d “be surprised if President Trump knew his lawyers were asking the Supreme Court to let the government break a deal.” 

“He’s the ultimate dealmaker — and I’m sure he’d agree that when the United States gives its word, it should keep it,” Markus said. “With all the talk about who’s being prosecuted and who isn’t, it’s especially unfair Ghislaine Maxwell remains in prison based on a promise the U.S. government made and broke.”

Maxwell’s connections with Epstein go back to the early 1990s, years before he was arrested and criminally convicted as a sex offender in 2008, when he pled guilty to soliciting prostitution from minors. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison under the controversial federal non-prosecution agreement brokered in Florida and was released from prison the following year. In 2019, Epstein was again arrested and charged, this time due to indictments for sex trafficking. He died in what officials deemed a suicide in his New York prison cell roughly one month after his arrest as he awaited trial for allegedly orchestrating a child sex trafficking ring along with Maxwell.

In 2020, Maxwell was arrested and convicted of sex trafficking the following year under charges that she recruited teenage girls who Epstein and his associates abused. She was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2021 for aiding Epstein’s crimes, and served approximately two years in solitary confinement before being transferred to a general facility in May 2022. 

Maxwell’s importance to the DOJ and FBI follows accusations from both Democrats and Republicans that the agencies are covering up information related to Epstein. Some MAGA-affiliated Republicans such as Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon have raised questions about Epstein’s potential connections to the intelligence community. They have suggested interested parties such as the CIA or Israel’s Mossad could have built Epstein as a government construct to monitor and influence influential figures across political, academic, scientific, and cultural spaces, allowing such agencies to shape public discourse and international relations.

In addition to Epstein’s ties to the Clinton and Obama administrations, deep relationships with world-renowned scientists, including at Harvard University, connections to Nobel Laureates like Stephen Hawking, and his friendship with Lex Wexner, the founder of a global retail empire that included Victoria’s Secret, the New Yorker’s relationship with Maxwell also raised speculation about where his money came from and who he was working with. 

Maxwell was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a Czechoslovak-born Jew who escaped the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War II, went on to become a British political figure in Parliament, and eventually the media-savvy owner of Pergamon Press. He was found dead floating in the Atlantic in 1991, with some speculating the death was shrouded in mystery, although it was ruled a drowning. 

Critics, among them Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, have claimed Maxwell’s father held ties to the Mossad, arguing that Epstein was involved in a shadowy underworld connected to an intelligence apparatus. Giuffre committed suicide earlier this year after accusing Maxwell of recruiting her to work as a “masseuse” for Epstein in 2000, when she was just 16, before the financier allegedly flew her all over the world to have trysts with powerful figures, including Great Britain’s Prince Andrew.  

“Does anyone else here also believe Epstein in all likelihood was a Mossad/CIA linked Intelligence agent that was responsible for helping run a Blackmail/Honey pot ring to entrap elite oligarchs?” Giuffre questioned in a 2023 statement to X, linking to a Reddit post.

“Based off all of Epstein’s known dubious activities,” the post added, “access to vast wealth, obvious connections to the Israeli Mossad (Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad was Robert Maxwell, a powerful British oligarch with Mossad ties), and Epstein’s suspicious murder that’s been covered up as a suicide, I think a strong argument can be made Epstein was indeed an Intelligence agent who helped run a blackmail/honey pot operation (that is most likely still running to this day). What better way to control the elites than to catch them doing something heinous and then hold it against them for life.” 

Accusations that Epstein was connected in any way to the Mossad were strongly disputed by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who called such allegations that the financier was “running a blackmail ring … categorically and totally false,” in a statement earlier this month. 

As he repeatedly promised to release long-sought government classified files pertaining to the now-deceased financer’s case, Trump used the Epstein saga to make a broader appeal to his base during the 2024 campaign: a promise to free the government from the control of elites, and rescue it from the abuses of shadowy deepstate powers, which some of his supporters believed included the once-powerful New York financier, and bring Washington back to the people.

As the Trump administration’s handling of the case this year has ruffled feathers in the president’s base, Maxwell could be the solution to stop the wound from bleeding out and provide some of the answers MAGA is searching for. 

Some, among them, Kraus — tied to Trump through Kennedy’s leadership at the HHS — have painted Maxwell as Epstein’s “first victim,” not guiltless, but among the many women he used as a means to accomplish a wider goal in a private world filled with intrigue. Others, like Elon Musk, who has repeatedly called for the release of the files, have questioned why Maxwell remains the only one of Epstein’s associates convicted of running the alleged human trafficking ring involving powerful clients. She took the brunt of the blame for Epstein’s crimes, they say, speculating it could be part of a broader strategy to shield the financier’s secret world from exposure. 

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Harvard affiliate Eric Weinstein are among other figures who have speculated that while the convicted sex offender’s reputation as a pedophile was valid, it represented only one layer of a complicated past. 

Weinstein, a mathematician who has conducted scientific research into the theory of gravity, suggested that Epstein was a “construct” of intelligence networks interested in scientific development, among a host of other priorities, during an interview on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast earlier this week. 

“Jeffrey Epstein was a construct of something that was running multiple things. One of those things was science. And I don’t think that the science and the pedophilia were necessarily in the same bucket. He was funding all sorts of people,” Weinstein said during the interview, which suggested that Epstein’s sex crimes have served as a distraction from a broader story regarding his alleged work on behalf of an intelligence apparatus to monitor and influence public consciousness.  

 “I met him once, but it was enough to know, ‘Holy cow, the Harvard Math Department can’t be what I think it is.’ Why was he there?” Weinstein continued. “He wasn’t a financier the day I met him. He was a weird guy who didn’t seem to know a lot about currency trading, claiming to run a multi-billion dollar FX hedge fund.”

If U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer presiding over Maxwell’s federal case approves the DOJ’s new request to unseal grand jury transcripts, new information about the case could shed more light on Epstein’s past. 

At Trump’s request, the DOJ’s deputy attorney general has urged the judge to release the transcripts from Epstein’s 2019 grand jury proceedings and those pertaining to Maxwell’s 2022 trial.

A TIMELINE OF TRUMP AND EPSTEIN’S RELATIONSHIP, FROM FRIENDSHIP TO FALLOUT AND BEYOND

Engelmayer, while writing that he intends to resolve Blanche’s request “expeditiously,” has requested additional information from the administration, including “what specific information is being sought for disclosure,” before he releases the grand jury transcripts. 

Maxwell also has a say in the matter. She has until August 5 to submit her position on the proposed unsealing.