The Predator’s Bargain

Trump’s DOJ Is cutting deals with Ghislaine Maxwell while her victims are silenced all over again

It’s not every day the Deputy Attorney General of the United States leaves Washington to personally negotiate with a convicted sex trafficker. But that’s exactly what’s happening this week and why Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former criminal defense attorney turned DOJ second-in-command, flew to Florida for a clandestine meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell at the federal courthouse in Tallahassee.

Not at her prison. Not through a federal intermediary. In person. In secret. With her personal attorney, David Oscar Markus, a longtime friend of Blanche’s who once almost represented Trump himself.

You couldn’t script a more obvious abuse of power if you tried. And yet, this isn’t a satire. It’s the current reality of the Trump DOJ, which appears far more interested in shielding Donald Trump from the Epstein scandal than in protecting the survivors who were trafficked, assaulted, and discarded like “used tissues,” as Maxwell once called them.

Maxwell, a woman convicted of sex trafficking minors for Jeffrey Epstein, is now being treated like a star witness instead of a convicted predator. Her attorney says she’s “taking this one step at a time” and that the DOJ meeting will “inform how she proceeds” with her upcoming August 11 deposition before Congress. Translation: she’s holding her silence hostage, waiting to see what she can extract, a commuted sentence, a pardon, a retrial, in exchange for playing the role Trump’s DOJ wants her to play.

Let’s be clear about who Ghislaine Maxwell is. She wasn’t Epstein’s secretary. She wasn’t a dupe. She wasn’t a side character. She was the chief recruiter, groomer, manipulator, and co-conspirator in a sprawling trafficking operation that may have exploited over a thousand girls, many of them underage, many of them abused not just by Epstein but by Ghislaine herself.

She lured children into his orbit using the façade of female mentorship. She posed as a glamorous benefactor. She made false promises about modeling careers, scholarships, jobs. She charmed them with her Oxford education and posh manners, only to usher them into rape rooms and hand them over to a predator. She sexually assaulted them herself. And she did this daily, methodically, with premeditation and malice. As one survivor recounted, Maxwell would start her day by declaring, “I need to get the nubiles.”

That’s who the Trump DOJ is now meeting with in secret. That’s who Trump’s MAGA allies are rehabilitating in real-time.

Greg Kelly of Newsmax now calls her “possibly a victim.” Charlie Kirk says she might deserve a deal. MAGA Rep. Tim Burchett floated the idea that Republicans may agree to reduce her sentence if she gives them something useful, if she doesn’t talk about Trump. Burchett called her a liar and a dirtbag, but then added: “If she plays ball, maybe there’s room for leniency.” A known sex trafficker being courted like a campaign surrogate.

Meanwhile, the 300 gigabytes of actual Epstein files, the ones with logs, hard drives, financial records, photos, and wiretaps, remain locked away inside the DOJ. Why? Because Donald Trump doesn’t want his name, which we now know appears numerous times, made public. Because it’s easier to extract a manufactured exoneration from Maxwell than to let the truth speak for itself.

This isn’t just a moral failure. It’s a political catastrophe, a regime so hell-bent on erasing its own guilt that it would rather strike a backroom deal with a child trafficker than face the victims it abandoned.

And those victims? They’re watching it happen again.

As journalist Tara Palmeri documented in her wrenching recent interview, survivors of Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse are not seeking revenge, they’re seeking acknowledgment. They’ve already told their stories. They’ve already testified. They’ve already relived every nightmare in public. Now they’re watching the woman who destroyed their childhoods get ferried to meetings with presidential allies while the files that might finally give them justice gather dust behind locked DOJ doors.

The trauma runs deep. One survivor, Courtney Wild, who was first abused at 12 and later helped challenge Epstein’s sweetheart plea deal, and served time in prison herself for unrelated charges. Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell, the woman who trafficked her and hundreds of others, is being offered the chance to rewrite her legacy in exchange for silence.

Maria Farmer, another survivor, said she feels revictimized by the government itself. And who could blame her? When the predator is elevated above the prey, what kind of justice system is that?

And let’s not forget: the original prosecutor who secured Maxwell’s conviction, Maureen Comey, was fired by Trump. Replaced by, you guessed it, Todd Blanche, the same man now meeting Maxwell in Tallahassee. The same man who pals around on podcasts with her lawyer. The same man who never prosecuted a single new figure connected to Epstein.

Instead of releasing the Epstein files, they’ve deployed a character assassination campaign against the victims, laundered Maxwell’s image through the far-right press, and ordered a DOJ fixer to sit down with her before she testifies.

This is about burying the truth, and worse, it’s about using a known abuser to erase the pain of the abused.

If this regime has its way, Maxwell won’t be remembered as a predator. She’ll be remembered as a “cooperative witness” who “cleared Trump’s name.” The victims? Forgotten again. Sacrificed again. Silenced again.

But they are still speaking. And we must listen. Because Ghislaine Maxwell does not deserve a deal. She deserves to rot.
And her victims deserve justice, not another deal brokered in the shadows.