Blanche said he won’t recommend a Maxwell pardon. Trump could still grant one.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made an almost interesting concession during his Senate testimony on Tuesday.
Under questioning from Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., President Donald Trump’s defense lawyer-turned-top Justice Department official said he would commit to not recommending a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Yes, I can commit to that, of course,” Blanche said of agreeing to not help the convicted child sex trafficker and associate of Jeffrey Epstein’s. In 2019, Epstein died in custody ahead of a federal trial on his own sex trafficking charges.
Fallout from Epstein’s sprawling connections, including his association with Trump (who has denied any wrongdoing), has haunted the president’s second term, as his administration has struggled to prove that it’s taking the Epstein matter seriously.
It should be unremarkable that the (acting) head of the DOJ would agree not to recommend a pardon to someone who has done nothing obvious to deserve one. But the fact that Van Hollen thought to pose the question emphasized that we’re in remarkable times.
In the spirit of these times, Blanche is not a traditional DOJ official but rather an avatar for the client he worked to keep out of jail ahead of the 2024 election. Now the two have moved offices to Washington and have the power of the United States government behind them.
One of the ways they used that power was when Blanche personally conducted what was, in theory, a “proffer” interview of Maxwell last year while she was incarcerated in a Florida prison to see what information she had related to Epstein.
On the one hand, Blanche was an unusual representative for that assignment, because there were other prosecutors who had worked on the matter for years and were more knowledgeable about it than a high-ranking DOJ official would be.
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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