5 Takeaways From Ghislaine Maxwell’s Interview About Jeffrey Epstein

The Trump administration on Friday released the transcript of a courthouse interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime confidante of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who maintained that President Trump and other famous figures were not involved in the sex-trafficking scheme she was convicted of.

In the interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Ms. Maxwell, who has made it clear she wants to end her 20-year sentence early, said many of the allegations against her and Mr. Epstein were false and swatted away a number of theories and loose ends in the case.

She also insisted that a “client list” of the rich and powerful associated with Mr. Epstein did not exist, and denied any scheme to blackmail his associates. The Justice Department and the F.B.I. had concluded in July that there was no specific “client list” for Mr. Epstein’s trafficking ring, and no credible evidence that “Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”

Mr. Epstein’s victims and their families had objected to the interview, and Ms. Maxwell’s subsequent transfer to a cushier prison, accusing Mr. Trump of offering a sweetheart deal to someone prosecutors say has a history of self-serving falsehoods.

Here’s what happened:

Maxwell praised Trump and distanced him from Epstein.

Ms. Maxwell acknowledged the social relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein but denied any connection between Mr. Trump and the sex-trafficking ring. She also denied recruiting an underage victim of Mr. Epstein who said she had been recruited while working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida estate and club, in 2000.

“I’ve never recruited a masseuse from Mar-a-Lago,” Ms. Maxwell said. Virginia Giuffre, who was 16 at the time, said she was approached by Ms. Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago and invited to become Mr. Epstein’s traveling masseuse. She said the two of them then groomed her to perform sexual services and passed her around “like a platter of fruit” to rich and powerful predators in Mr. Epstein’s circle, including Prince Andrew of Britain.

Neither Ms. Maxwell nor Mr. Blanche, who was Mr. Trump’s trial lawyer before becoming deputy attorney general, mentioned Ms. Giuffre by name during the interview. But Ms. Maxwell denied a specific allegation made by Ms. Giuffre — that Andrew had forced her to have sex at Ms. Maxwell’s home in London — as “absolute rubbish.” Ms. Giuffre died by suicide this year.

Ms. Maxwell, who is seeking a pardon or reduction of her sentence, downplayed Mr. Trump’s long friendship with Mr. Epstein and went out of her way to praise the president. Mr. Trump, asked whether he would consider pardoning Ms. Maxwell last month, said, “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I haven’t thought about.”

“I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way,” Ms. Maxwell said during the interview. “The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

Maxwell said she believed Epstein didn’t kill himself.

Ms. Maxwell, who was not present for Mr. Epstein’s death, speculated that Mr. Epstein did not commit suicide. She did not offer any particular theory of what had instead happened, but downplayed the possibility that someone had Mr. Epstein killed with the intention of eliminating evidence of the sex-trafficking ring.

“I don’t see that,” Ms. Maxwell said. “I think, is it possible? Of course it’s possible. But I don’t know of any reason why, and I don’t believe in the blackmail or in any of this, I don’t think Epstein had a hit on like that. If it is indeed murder, I believe it was an internal situation.”

A yearslong Justice Department investigation concluded that Mr. Epstein, who was found dead in his cell with a bedsheet tied around his neck in 2019, died by suicide, not foul play.

Blanche appeared to play political favorites with his questions.

At several crucial moments in the expansive interview, Mr. Blanche peppered Ms. Maxwell with questions about some of Mr. Epstein’s associates, while dropping other lines of questioning when the conversation appeared to be politically inconvenient.

Mr. Blanche, for example, asked many more questions about Mr. Epstein’s relationship with former President Bill Clinton than he did about Mr. Epstein’s relationship with Mr. Trump. In the end, Ms. Maxwell denied that either had engaged in sexual misconduct or other inappropriate behavior, and said neither had visited Mr. Epstein’s private islands.

At one point, as Ms. Maxwell defended Mr. Epstein and denied the allegations of sex trafficking, she said associates of Mr. Epstein had been unfairly vilified for their relationships with him.

“Some are in your cabinet, who you value as your co-workers,” Ms. Maxwell said. She did not make clear whom she meant, but at another point she said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, once joined Mr. Epstein on a trip to hunt for dinosaur bones in the Dakotas. She added that there was no way Mr. Epstein’s associates “would be with him if he was a creep or because they wanted sexual favors.”

Mr. Blanche immediately moved on, and the claim that other associates of Mr. Epstein work in the Trump administration was never brought up again.

In other exchanges, Mr. Blanche came across as unusually deferential. At one point, he reassured Ms. Maxwell that “if I think that you’re not being honest, or that you’re missing something, I’m not going to — this isn’t ‘got you.’” When he ended the second day of the interview with Ms. Maxwell, he complimented her for going through with the interview and said that “we’ll be in touch soon.”

Maxwell discussed her and Epstein’s connections to the rich and powerful.

Mr. Blanche asked Ms. Maxwell about many of the rich and powerful figures in Mr. Epstein’s orbit, but got little out of her. She named many celebrities, businessmen and politicians — Elon Musk, Andrew M. Cuomo, John F. Kerry, Edward M. Kennedy, Sarah Ferguson, Naomi Campbell, Alan Dershowitz, Kevin Spacey and Larry Summers — but said they were simply friends or had business relationships with her and Mr. Epstein.

She described, for instance, how she and Mr. Musk had met in 2010 or 2011 at a party for Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and said that she had learned through legal discovery that Mr. Musk and Mr. Epstein had communicated by email. Mr. Musk, in the midst of a public spat with Mr. Trump earlier this year, had said that the president’s name was “in the Epstein files” and “that is why they have not been made public”

Ms. Maxwell also said Mr. Epstein had been close to Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, but under further questioning she said she remembered little of their encounters, or why he had been close to Mr. Epstein.

Maxwell denied working with intelligence agencies.

One of the conspiracy theories surrounding Mr. Epstein is the unfounded accusation that the sex trafficking was a means to collect blackmail material on his powerful and influential associates. Particularly in right-wing circles, the theory goes further to suggest that Mr. Epstein was being paid for the blackmail effort in connection with intelligence and law enforcement agencies, like the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and even the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

Ms. Maxwell emphatically denied most of those accusations, and said she had no knowledge of others. In one particularly noteworthy exchange, Mr. Blanche asked if she had ever had contact with a Mossad agent.

“Well, not deliberately,” Ms. Maxwell said.

“Pardon me?” Mr. Blanche asked.

She repeated, “Not deliberately.”

Mr. Blanche did not ask what she meant by that, and moved on.