The Justice Department will not be letting British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell off the hook for her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring.
Currently serving a 20-year prison sentence, Maxwell’s lawyers argued she shouldn’t have been put on trial in the first place because of the plea deal Epstein reached with Florida prosecutors in 2008.
But Donald Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi’s DOJ responded in a filing on Monday saying that the Supreme Court should not take up her case.
The disgraced socialite, 63, was spotted working off steam before the ruling was made – all while the Epstein Files storm continues to rupture Trump’s Washington DC.
In a statement to Daily Mail, Maxwell’s attorney David Oscar Markus stated: ‘He’s the ultimate dealmaker – and I’m sure he’d agree that when the United States gives its word, it should keep it.
‘With all the talk about who’s being prosecuted and who isn’t, it’s especially unfair that Ghislaine Maxwell remains in prison based on a promise the government made and broke.’
John Sauer, Trump’s pick for Solicitor General, hit Maxwell’s attorneys for an ‘implausible reading’ of the law and ‘misplaced’ arguments they made the case for the government to drop her charges.
The decision comes after Maxwell was seen looking like any other prisoner while out for a run while behind bars at FCI Tallahassee – dressed in drab gray pants and top.
Maxwell, a longtime fitness enthusiast, stared into the distance and at one point stopped to catch her breath during the 45-minute-long evening run around 7.15pm before heading back into her cell at 8pm.
Bondi, meanwhile, can’t seem to escape the Epstein case despite her desperate attempts to leave it in the rearview mirror.
The Maxwell filing comes at a particularly charged time for Bondi where, as head of DOJ, she is under fire by pro-MAGA firebrands claiming she botched the Epstein files review.
Last weekend the DOJ and FBI leaked an unsigned memo concluding that Epstein did kill himself in prison in August 2019 and that he did not hold a converted ‘client list’ of high-profile co-conspirators.
The memo said that no more people would be arrested, charged or convicted in the Epstein child sex trafficking case.
An uproar ensued among Trump’s base with calls for him to fire Bondi, and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino threatening to resign if the AG stuck around.
Republicans and Democrats aren’t buying the story that there isn’t more to be learned from the evidence in the case.
Meanwhile, the DOJ is facing a staffing issue at the office charged with defending legal challenges against Trump administration policies.
Of the roughly 110 lawyers in the Federal Programs Branch, 69 have voluntarily left or announced plans to leave since President Donald Trump’s election in November, according to Reuters.
Trump has defended Bondi’s leadership at the Justice Department despite a growing chorus of pro-MAGA voices expressing ire at her handling of the Epstein files.
The 21-page document by Bondi’s DOJ rejects Maxwell’s argument that Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement (NPA) from 2008 when he was first investigated, under which he served just 15 months in a state prison after admitting soliciting minors for prostitution, gave her immunity.
The unusual wording of the deal covered four women from future prosecution by the federal government but Maxwell was not among them.
The letter says the idea that this deal covered the entire US government – including the Southern District of New York, which brought her to trial in 2021 – was ‘incorrect.’
The agreement, signed by prosecutors in Florida, ‘cannot reasonably be construed’ to refer to US Attorneys in every area of the nation.
Such a reading is ‘implausible,’ the missive states baldly, noting that the lower appeal court already reached such a conclusion.
The document states: ‘While “the United States” could conceivably refer to the entire federal government, as petitioner urges, the entirety and context of the NPA here make clear that the term is used – as it often is – as one alternative way to refer to the USAO (federal prosecutors) executing the agreement’.
In another part of the filing, the DOJ ridicules Maxwell’s suggestion that the words ‘United States’ refers to the entire country, rather than just Florida prosecutors within the context of the NPA.
‘The term did not take on some unique broader meaning in the co-conspirators’ clause,’ the document states.
Maxwell’s petition is an ‘unsuitable candidate’ for the US Supreme Court to take up, the document claims.
Given that she was not named in the NPA, Maxwell is ‘at most, an incidental third-party beneficiary of the agreement.’
The filing does include one curious detail: that prosecutors didn’t know about Maxwell’s role with Epstein at the time of the deal in 2008.
However, multiple victims reported speaking to or seeing a woman with a British accent, and Maxwell flew constantly on Epstein’s plane.
During her trial in 2021, she was described as Epstein’s girlfriend during the late 1990s and 2000s and she lived with him at his homes in Palm Beach, Florida, and New York.
The document states: ‘There is no evidence that the parties to the NPA intended for the coconspirators clause to benefit petitioner (Maxwell). The government was not even aware of petitioner’s role in Epstein’s scheme at that time’.
Maxwell is still the only person facing the music for Epstein’s crimes.
Her lawyers and family are yet to appeal directly to the president for a pardon if the Supreme Court rejects her plea, although former Trump friend and attorney Alan Dershowitz tells Daily Mail that he would be right to consider it.
He believes the disgraced socialite’s ‘excessive’ 20-year sentence should be commuted for her immediate release, and then a pardon.
‘Certainly she should get a commutation. The sentence was way, way, way in excess of anything she was alleged to have done.
‘She was in part a victim of Epstein. The fact that Epstein died made her a primary target and caused an excessive sentence to her. Some executive clemency is very much warranted in her case.’
While the disgraced financier was in prison, he died on August 10, 2019 in what was determined to be a suicide by hanging.
And the Daily Mail revealed exclusively this week that Maxwell is willing to speak before Congress about the so-called ‘list.’
A source said: ‘Despite the rumors, Ghislaine was never offered any kind of plea deal. She would be more than happy to sit before Congress and tell her story.
‘No-one from the government has ever asked her to share what she knows. She remains the only person to be jailed in connection to Epstein and she would welcome the chance to tell the American public the truth.’
What that ‘truth’ is remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, an associate of Epstein’s, was arrested on December 16, 2020 by French authorities, but also died by suicide in 2022 before his trial could proceed.
Therefore Maxwell is the only one left serving a sentence for the child sex trafficking crimes on charges of perjury, enticement and conspiracy to entice minors and the transportation of minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.
In June 2022 she was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
But Maxwell’s lawyers say she should have never been put up on trial.
‘Despite the existence of a non-prosecution agreement promising in plain language that the United States would not prosecute any co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein, the United States in fact prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell as a co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein,’ they wrote in a filing reviewed by Newsweek.
‘Only because the United States did so in the Second Circuit and not elsewhere, her motion to dismiss the indictment was denied, her trial proceeded, and she is now serving a 20-year sentence,’ they lamented.
Due to the disparity between how circuit courts interpret the plea deals made by the U.S. with plaintiffs, Epstein’s lawyers were requesting a review by the DOJ on initial charges against Maxwell.
In at least five other circuit court jurisdictions, Maxwell’s dismissal request would have likely been granted – this includes the Eleventh Circuit where Epstein’s agreement was entered.
‘This inconsistency in the law by which the same promise by the United States means different things in different places should be addressed by this Court,’ Maxwell’s lawyers argued.
