The operation to free Ghislaine Maxwell has been running since the day she was jailed. This week three separate doors swung open at once — a presidential pardon, a congressional immunity grant, and a motion to vacate her sex-trafficking conviction. Each remedy is being built around one outcome. Maxwell walks. Trump stays cleared. The public never gets the witness under oath.
Lev Parnas, who spent years inside the Trump circle as a cooperating witness during the first impeachment, said there has been a direct call between Donald Trump and House Oversight Chair James Comer on the Maxwell question. “There has been a call between Comer and Trump directly where Trump is basically putting pressure on where not for them to give,” Parnas said on Narativ Live. Comer, who wants to run for governor of Kentucky next year, is personally against a pardon and has called Maxwell “other than Epstein, the worst person in this whole investigation.” His caucus is split. Parnas said Trump is laying track for a narrative that gives him cover — “if you want it, you know, Congress is asking, and we need her to come out and testify” — and is even floating “names dropped of some dead people” as the fresh testimony Maxwell would supposedly provide.
The operative running the play inside DOJ is Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Parnas, who said Blanche was once on his own legal team, described a man doing “everything in his power” to hold the job Pam Bondi lost three weeks ago. Blanche interviewed Maxwell for nine hours in Tallahassee last July. He has since publicly declared DOJ’s releases under the Epstein Files Transparency Act complete. Maxwell’s attorney David Oscar Markus is a close friend of Blanche, Parnas said, and the arrangement between them was worked out behind the scenes. Maxwell “is not planning on sitting in prison while everybody’s getting pardons,” Parnas said. Her offer to the administration, in Markus’s own words: grant her clemency and she will testify “openly and honestly, in public, before Congress” that Trump did nothing wrong.
PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL
