The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 28 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal keeps taking new twists and turns. As of this recording, Ghislaine Maxwell, the former partner of Epstein who was serving 20 years for sex trafficking, has been in talks with the Justice Department, supposedly divulging what she knows about his activities. Maxwell’s attorney has just confirmed that she’s seeking a pardon from President Trump, which raises the possibility that she will exonerate him in exchange for that pardon. But we’ve been wondering: Isn’t it highly likely that we will, in fact, sooner or later know what’s in the Epstein files? We think yes—because there are all sorts of ways more information can come out. And once we do know that information, what happens then? Philip Rotner, a lawyer, just wrote a good piece for The Bulwark pulling on a lot of these different threads. So we’re talking to him about all of this today. Thanks for coming on, Philip.

Philip Rotner: Thanks for having me, Greg. I appreciate it.

Sargent: So MAGA spent years screaming for the release of information collected in the course of investigating Jeffrey Epstein, who was arrested for sex trafficking in 2019. They thought that these files, as they’re being called, would reveal extensive evidence of Democratic pedophilia and so forth. But once Trump took over, his top officials looked at that information and decided not to release it. Now Ghislaine Maxwell has entered the story. She met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche twice, and Blanche just happens to be Trump’s former personal attorney. Phil, can you very briefly tell us who Ghislaine Maxwell is and bring us up to the present?

Rotner: Ghislaine Maxwell was a British socialite—part of the Maxwell family—and she was a very close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, many of Epstein’s victims have described her as something of a procurer for him. She would round up young women to come and give Epstein massages and perform sex acts. And according to some of the victims, she actually participated physically in some of those acts. She was convicted in 2021 of a variety of actions connected to Epstein: sex trafficking of a minor, transporting a minor, conspiracy to commit sex trafficking, and so on. And she’s currently serving a 20-year sentence.

Sargent: That brings us up to the present. Why exactly is Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche meeting with Maxwell? What is he ostensibly trying to find out, and what is he actually trying to do?

Rotner: So it’s good that you broke it down into those two pieces because there are, indeed, two pieces. Ostensibly, he’s conducting some investigation in response to the hue and cry coming originally from the MAGA right and now from everywhere to release more information about Epstein and the Epstein files. What I believe he’s really trying to do is create the appearance of an investigation. It looks very much like a sham to me. He is Trump’s lawyer. He says even recently that he continues to have an attorney-client relationship with Donald Trump. He not only was Trump’s lawyer but he also reports to Donald Trump now. And he’s the one who’s going out to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell to unearth evidence that clearly involves Donald Trump—at least as a witness and maybe even as a subject. So it just seems completely phony, and any pretext that there’s a real investigation going on, I think, is just that.

Sargent: So Philip, we know Trump is in the Epstein files in some capacity or other. That’s been reported now. Now we don’t know what that exactly means. It could be pretty innocent: He maybe was a longtime associate of Epstein but never participated in anything criminal or hideously immoral like the stuff Epstein........

© New Republic