Epstein's client list does not exist, Ghislaine Maxwell says

Ghislaine Maxwell defended Donald Trump in a court-released transcript, telling investigators the US president "was never inappropriate with anybody" during questioning about her convicted sex-trafficking partnership with Jeffrey Epstein.

The Trump administration issued transcripts from interviews that the US court conducted with 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 that she had observed Trump engaged in any form of sexual behaviour.

The administration was presumably eager to make such denials public at a time when the president had faced questions about a long-ago friendship with Epstein and as his administration had 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.

By making public two days' worth of interviews, officials appear to be hoping to at least temporarily keep at bay sustained anger from Trump’s base as they send Congress evidence they had previously kept from view.

After her interview, Maxwell was moved from the low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas to continue serving a 20-year sentence for her 2021 conviction on allegations that she lured teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein and or his friends.

Her trial featured sordid accounts of the sexual exploitation of girls as young as 14 told by four women who described being abused as teens in the 1990s and early 2000s at Epstein's homes.

Neither Maxwell's lawyers nor the federal Bureau of Prisons have explained the reason for the move, but one of her lawyers, David Oscar Markus, said in a social media post Friday that Maxwell was “innocent and never should have been tried, much less convicted.”

‘Never inappropriate’

“I actually never saw (Trump) in any type of massage setting,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript. “I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

Maxwell recalled knowing about Trump and possibly meeting him for the first time in 1990, when her newspaper magnate father, Robert Maxwell, was the owner of the New York Daily News. She said she had been to Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, sometimes alone, but hadn’t seen Trump since the mid-2000s.

Asked if she ever heard Epstein or anyone else say Trump “had done anything inappropriate with masseuses” or anyone else in their orbit, Maxwell replied, “Absolutely never, in any context.”

Maxwell was interviewed over the course of two days last month at a Florida courthouse. She was given limited immunity, allowing her to speak freely without fear of prosecution for anything she said except for in the event of a false statement.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department on Friday began sending to the House Oversight Committee records from the investigation that the panel says it intends to make public after removing the victim's information.

High-profile contacts

The case had long captured public attention in part because of the wealthy financier’s social connections over the years to prominent figures, including Britain's Prince Andrew, former US President Bill Clinton, and Trump, who has said he had a falling-out with Epstein years ago — well before Epstein came under investigation.

Maxwell told the US Justice Department that Clinton was initially her friend, not Epstein’s, and that she never saw him receive a massage — nor did she believe he ever did. The only times they were together, she said, were the two dozen or so times they travelled on Epstein’s plane.

“That would’ve been the only time that I think that Clinton could have even received a massage,” Maxwell said. “And he didn’t, because I was there.”

She also spoke glowingly of Prince Andrew and dismissed as “rubbish” the late Virginia Giuffre’s claim that she was paid to have a relationship with Andrew and that he had sex with her at Maxwell’s London home.

Maxwell sought to distance herself from Epstein’s conduct, repeatedly denying allegations made during her trial about her role.

Though she acknowledged that at one point Epstein began preferring younger women, she insisted she never understood that to “encompass children”.

“I did see from when I met him, he was involved or -- involved or friends with or whatever, however you want to characterise it, with women who were in their 20s,” she told the attorney.

“And then the slide to, you know, 18 or younger looking women. But I never considered that this would encompass criminal behaviour.”

Epstein was arrested in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges, accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, and was found dead a month later in a New York jail cell in an apparent suicide.