Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday defended the decision to move convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum-security prison earlier this year, citing threats against her as the reason for the transfer.
In a Sunday morning interview on “Meet the Press” with NBC’s Kristen Welker, Blanche said the decision to transfer Maxwell to a less restrictive facility was made by the Bureau of Prisons, adding that “every decision that they make lands on my desk to the extent it needs to.”
“At the time that I met Miss Maxwell, there was a tremendous amount of scrutiny and publicity toward her, and the institution she was in, she was suffering numerous and numerous threats against her life,” Blanche said. He did not elaborate on the threats.
Maxwell was moved from a prison in Florida to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas this summer shortly after she met with Blanche as part of the Trump administration’s effort to quiet backlash over its handling of the federal government’s documents related to the late Jeffrey Epstein.
Maxwell, Epstein's convicted accomplice and onetime girlfriend, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on child sex trafficking charges in 2022. Bureau of Prisons policy generally prohibits people with a sex offender determination known as a “public safety factor” from being housed in minimum-security prisons.
Blanche added that Maxwell “might be moved to another institution tomorrow if security requires it, and that's true of any federal inmate across this country.”
Maxwell is also seeking a commutation from the Trump administration according to a document obtained by the House Democrats, POLITICO reported last month. The Supreme Court declined to take up her appeal in October, leaving a possible pardon or commutation — which Trump has not ruled out — as her likely last avenue to sidestep her sentence.
Maxwell, who has exhausted all of her direct appeals, reportedly asked a federal court to vacate or correct her conviction and sentence on Wednesday, a Hail-Mary request that argues she did not receive a fair trial according to “substantial new evidence.”
Blanche also defended the decision to speak with Maxwell over two days in July, noting that the Department of Justice had also met with victims and victims’ rights groups as recently as Thursday.
“Nobody ever talked to her. Nobody ever asked her questions about what she knew. So when she said she had something she wanted to say — notwithstanding the fact that she had been convicted — of course we went and talked to her,” he said. “Imagine if we didn't talk to her. Imagine she said: I have a story to tell and I would like to talk to the government and I said no. The same outrage would be directed at this department for not speaking with her.”
He also fiercely defended the Justice Department’s decision to heavily redact files released Friday in compliance with a bill signed into law by President Donald Trump last month, insisting the DOJ remained in compliance with the law despite missing the deadline to release all of its files related to Epstein.
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