Washington — Todd Blanche, the second highest-ranking Justice Department official, will meet with Ghislaine Maxwell at the U.S. attorney’s office in Tallahassee on Thursday to discuss convicted sex officer Jeffrey Epstein, a source familiar with the plans confirmed to CBS News.
Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence at a low-security federal correctional institute in Tallahassee after she was convicted in 2021 for her role in helping Jeffrey Epstein recruit, groom and abuse underage girls.
Blanche’s meeting comes after he said earlier this week that he planned to meet with Maxwell, an associate of Epstein’s, “in the coming days.”
“Justice demands courage. For the first time, the Department of Justice is reaching out to Ghislaine Maxwell to ask: what do you know?” Blanche wrote on social media Tuesday. He said he contacted Maxwell’s lawyers at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi. “I intend to meet with her soon. No one is above the law — and no lead is off-limits,” Blanche wrote.
David Oscar Markus, Maxwell’s lawyer, then confirmed that her legal team was in discussions with the government.
Pressure has been building on President Trump and his administration over Epstein’s case after the Justice Department and FBI released a memo earlier this month that concluded Epstein did not have a “client list” and confirmed he died by suicide in 2019, shortly after he was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges.
The memo also concluded that there was no “credible evidence” that the disgraced financier blackmailed prominent people. The Justice Department and FBI said they would not release any further information about Epstein’s case.
But the Trump administration’s conclusions rankled some of his allies, who were skeptical of the Justice Department’s claim that there is nothing left to divulge.
Some of the administration’s top officials, including Vice President JD Vance and FBI Director Kash Patel, had suggested before Mr. Trump returned to the White House that Democrats were hiding information about Epstein and his alleged list of clients.
In an effort to quell the backlash, the Justice Department asked federal judges in New York who handled Epstein and Maxwell’s cases to unseal transcripts from grand jury proceedings involving the two.
Earlier this week, judges overseeing the requests each ordered the Justice Department to submit additional filings to the court about its efforts to unseal the grand jury records. The judges gave the defendants — in Epstein’s case, his representative — and victims until Aug. 5 to lay out their positions on the proposed disclosure.
It will be up to the judges to decide whether the grand jury material can be disclosed. If they grant the requests, the information will likely be heavily redacted, and it is likely to be weeks or months before the transcripts are unsealed.
In addition to facing backlash from some of his allies, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have pushed to make material related to Epstein public.
A House panel voted Wednesday to subpoena the Justice Department for files related to the federal probe into Epstein. The House Oversight Committee also subpoenaed Maxwell to sit for a deposition next month at the federal detention center in Tallahassee.
Mr. Trump has acknowledged he and Epstein moved in the same social circles in Florida and New York from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. But the president said in 2019, following Epstein’s arrest, that they hadn’t spoken in 15 years.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Mr. Trump signed a “bawdy” letter to Epstein for his 50th birthday that said, in part, “may every day be another wonderful secret.” CBS News has not independently seen or verified the letter. The president has denied that he wrote the letter, calling it “fake,” and sued the Journal and its owners for defamation. He is seeking at least $20 billion in damages.
The Journal reported Wednesday that when Justice Department officials reviewed documents related to Epstein earlier this year, they learned Mr. Trump’s name appeared multiple times. Bondi and her deputy told the president at a White House meeting in May that his name was in the so-called Epstein files, as were those of other public figures, according to the Journal.
That Mr. Trump was mentioned does not mean he committed any wrongdoing.
White House communications director Steven Cheung said in response to the Journal’s report that “The fact is that The President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media, just like the Obama Russiagate scandal, which President Trump was right about.”
