It’s all about the art of the deal — the quid pro quo.
Jeffrey Epstein was perhaps the most conspicuous pimp since the Marquis de Sade, and he did so on a grand scale. His associates included bankers, princes, CEOs, governors and past and future presidents.
One of Epstein’s friends was President Trump. Their relationship lasted 15 years. We don’t know how their friendship got started, and we don’t know the exact details of why it persisted or ended. We do know that it has become an albatross for Trump in his second term.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump — assuming that the Epstein files contained a list of prominent Democrats who were clients — promised his MAGA base that, if elected, the government files would be released. Now, the Wall Street Journal has suggested Trump’s own name could be in the files, which are closely guarded by his captive Justice Department.
So, what to do? The first line of defense is deception. Pretend you are making full disclosure when you are not. Vice President JD Vance proclaimed Trump’s commitment to full disclosure. “First of all, the president has been very clear,” Vance said. “We’re not shielding anything. The president has directed the attorney general to release all credible information and, frankly, to go and find additional credible information related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.”
What Vance failed to say is that Trump did not order his attorney general to disclose the files that would be the “most credible information” to be examined in all their stark significance. Trump prevaricated and ordered her only to unseal the grand jury minutes underlying the prosecutions of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, indicted in the Southern District in 2020, tried and convicted in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in 2022.
Any prosecutor will tell you that grand jury minutes are largely uninformative. They will not normally include the thousands of pages of video and audio tapes, witness statements and other documentary evidence residing in the Justice Department’s files. Also, grand jury minutes are by law secret and may only be unsealed by order of the court, where there are very narrow grounds. Justice Department lawyers went through the motions of a kamikaze mission to have the court unseal the minutes, and two federal courts have now denied the motion, as expected.
This ploy would hardly satisfy elements of Trump’s MAGA base, which by now was screaming for full disclosure of the files that might tell the full story of his relationship with Epstein.
The Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee got into the act, subpoenaing Maxwell to testify. She presumably was in the room where it happened and could answer the key questions about the Trump-Epstein relation. As might be expected, Maxwell invoked her Fifth Amendment rights unless she was granted full immunity. A spokesperson for the committee replied that it “will not consider granting congressional immunity for her testimony.”
What a charade! If there ever was a “don’t throw me in the briar patch” scenario, this was it. That might have ended the matter. But what if Trump needed to be sure of Maxwell’s silence? A peek at what Maxwell might say would help. So would a deal about what Maxwell wouldn’t say.
There was talk of clemency and a full pardon. Trump said, “Well, I’m allowed to give her a pardon, but nobody’s approached me with it. Nobody’s asked me about it.” He had to do his due diligence first.
Trump considers himself the master of the art of the deal — the quid pro quo. This has been his core philosophy from the old days in Queens, Manhattan, Atlantic City and Roy Cohn. He has made other deals for women’s silence, lest we forget Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels.
Trump’s freezing of urgently needed military aid to Ukraine in a bid to extract political dirt on the Bidens during his first term was a classic. This quid pro quo led to his 2020 impeachment — a reference to which, as it just happens, was removed last month from an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution. (A modified reference has now been restored.) His appointment of three justices to the Supreme Court who would vote his way whenever the issue was presented might be another. And his dismissal of the indictment of New York City Mayor Eric Adams was widely decried as a quid pro quo for Adams’s kowtowing to Trump’s draconian immigration crackdown.
So, has the time come for a quid pro quo with Maxwell? Her current lawyer is David Oscar Markus, a Florida-based criminal defense attorney who is a friend of Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer and now the deputy attorney general. An ethicist might say there is nothing wrong with this, but one might fairly wonder why Attorney General Pam Bondi chose Blanche to coordinate with Markus about an extraordinary meeting with his imprisoned client.
The two-day recorded meeting occurred and, according to Markus, Blanche asked Maxwell about “100 different people.” Maxwell reportedly “answered every single question” truthfully and to the best of her ability. It is interesting that Maxwell was willing to talk to Blanche but unwilling to talk to Congress.
One week later, without explanation and to the consternation of the victims’ families, Maxwell was transferred from a low security prison in Tallahassee to a minimum-security prison in Bryan, Texas. Sex offenders, the New York Times reports, are rarely sent to minimum-security prisons, which house inmates with the lowest level of security risk.
You may ask whether Trump approved the transfer. You can bet on it. This Justice Department doesn’t make a move without Trump’s thumb on the scale.
Is favored treatment the part of a deal to ensure silence about Trump? Is it the prelude to a pardon for Maxwell? After all, with Trump, it’s all about the quid pro quo.
James D. Zirin, author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York’s Southern District. He is the host of the public television talk show and podcast Conversations with Jim Zirin.
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