Donald Trump’s Justice Department on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reject an effort by Ghislaine Maxwell to fight a decision upholding her conviction for trafficking disadvantaged girls to be sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein.
Maxwell has argued that Epstein’s infamous non-prosecution deal with former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta — in which the feds promised not to go after him and his coconspirators — should have barred Manhattan prosecutors from bringing charges against her 13 years later.
Maxwell’s bid, filed in April, asked the nation’s top court to determine whether a U.S. attorney’s promise to a defendant on behalf of the government must be honored by federal prosecutors nationwide.
New York’s 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Maxwell’s appeal effort last year, finding that the deal drawn up in 2007 and approved the following year only protected Epstein and his coconspirators in South Florida. The Justice Department Monday reiterated its position that the deal didn’t apply in New York.
Patrick McMullan Archives
Patrick McMullan via Getty Image Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in 2005. (Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
Monday’s filings came amid renewed interest into who knew about Epstein’s abuse and as the Trump administration has come under intense scrutiny from supporters of the president for the decision not to disclose whatever information remains about the disgraced financier.
The announcement came after Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, who had previously peddled unfounded Epstein conspiracy theories, vowed to release any documents still under seal to the public. Bondi, in February, claimed Epstein’s so-called “client list” was “sitting on my desk.”
An FBI and DOJ memo backtracking on that promise last week said a review determined “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”
“This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” the memo read.
Amid a firestorm of criticism, Trump took to Truth Social over the weekend, telling his supporters not to “waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”
AP
(L to R) US Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino. (AP)
In the government’s Monday response, Trump’s former personal lawyer turned solicitor general, John Sauer, said the Supreme Court should decline to consider Maxwell’s appeal. He countered that the deal didn’t even protect Epstein from facing charges in New York, as he did a month before hanging himself in August 2019.
“It would be extremely strange if the [non-prosecution agreement] left Epstein himself open to federal prosecution in another district … while protecting his coconspirators from prosecution anywhere,” the filing reads.
The highly unusual deal Acosta offered Epstein permitted him to plead guilty to state, not federal, charges, alleging he solicited a 14-year-old girl for sex. He served 13 months of an 18-month term, during which time he was permitted to leave the county jail to work. In addition to the lenient punishment, the deal afforded immunity to a host of the Brooklyn-born financier’s coconspirators.
After Esptein’s first arrest, cops with the Palm Beach police department had identified at least 33 girls he had recruited to sexually abuse, typically under the guise of receiving massages, according to court documents in related civil litigation.
None of the girls and women to levy accusations or their parents were informed the feds were declining to prosecute him until after the fact, a decision the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility in 2020 said amounted to “poor judgment.” Acosta resigned as Trump’s labor secretary during Trump’s first term amid scrutiny over his decision making in the case.
Epstein killed himself at the now-shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center on Aug. 10, 2019, around a month after his high-profile arrest on the tarmac at Teterboro Airport. He had faced sex trafficking and conspiracy charges stemming from abuse allegedly committed in New York and Florida between 2003 and 2005.
Maxwell, a one-time socialite in New York and London’s high societies who holds British and French citizenship, was hit with the same charges as Epstein a year later for allegedly acting as his coconspirator between 1994 and 1997. She was later charged with an additional sex trafficking count for events within the period covered by the non-prosecution agreement, which she was convicted of and that her lawyers say should have been barred.
Following a lengthy Manhattan federal court trial, at which witnesses said Maxwell went from being Epstein’s girlfriend in the early 1990s to the primary facilitator of his abuse and “lady of the house,” a jury convicted her on Dec. 29, 2021, on five out of six counts. She’s serving a 20-year sentence at FCI Tallahassee, a low-security prison in Florida.
Four women testified against Maxwell at her trial, one of whom, Carolyn Andriano, has since died of an overdose. Another prominent Epstein accuser, Virginia Giuffre, who was granted a large monetary settlement in litigation with British Prince Andrew, an Epstein associate, died by suicide in April.
Jurors heard that Maxwell and Epstein primarily targeted girls from disadvantaged backgrounds with poor single mothers, first isolating them from loved ones with promises to pull them out of poverty before engaging in abuse.
Jurors at Maxwell’s trial saw flight logs showing Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump flew multiple times on Epstein’s private Boeing and heard about how Maxwell employed a pyramid scheme of abuse, recruiting victims to find other girls by paying them large amounts of cash to perform sexualized massages. Lawyer Alan Dershowitz, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell and Prince Andrew also featured in the flight logs.
Sauer, among other positions, in Monday’s brief argued that Maxwell wasn’t a party to Epstein and the feds’ deal and that when it was negotiated, DOJ policy barred U.S. attorneys from making deals that bound prosecutors in other districts, like in New York.
An attorney for Maxwell, David Oscar Markus, could not immediately be reached for comment.
