Ghislaine Maxwell has denied ever witnessing any inappropriate behaviour by Donald Trump, newly released transcripts reveal.
The US justice department on Friday published recordings of an interview Todd Blanche, one of Mr Trump’s top law enforcement officials, conducted with the ex-girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein from a Florida courthouse in July.
Releasing the full transcripts to the public appears to be an attempt to put an end to weeks’ worth of damaging stories which have dogged the administration.
Mr Trump has faced fierce criticism from his base for refusing to publish documents held by the government on Epstein, the paedophile financier who died in 2019.
According to the transcripts, Maxwell told Mr Blanche, the deputy attorney general, that Mr Trump was “a gentleman in all respects”.
“The president was never inappropriate with anybody,” she said.
“In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”
Maxwell also commented on other prominent figures including the Duchess of York, tech billionaire Elon Musk, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is now Mr Trump’s health and human services secretary, Bill Clinton, the former US president, and economist Larry Summers, who served as Mr Clinton’s treasury secretary.
The Telegraph has reviewed the transcripts – read below for the details.
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We’ll bring you more news and analysis on Saturday morning.
In the meantime, you can read our summary of the key takeaways from the Ghislaine Maxwell’s prison interview.
Ghislaine Maxwell has said that Bill Clinton and Larry Summers could have had sexual massages during their friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaking to Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, she said that the former US president and treasury secretary were “men” and that it’s possible they could have received a massage with sexual favours, although she did not know if this was the case.
She said: “To suggest that Larry Summers or Clinton would certainly go, oh my gosh, this is like a guy I’m going to get my body rubbed and have some sex.
“They’re men that went and had a massage and maybe did something sexual, they’re men, I wasn’t in the room. I cannot tell you if that happened.”
The release of Ghislaine Maxwell’s interview comes on the same day that the Trump administration provided the first batch of the “Epstein files” to a key congressional committee.
The House oversight committee issued a subpoena for all the documents held by the justice department on Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier earlier this month.
Pam Bondi, the attorney general, agreed to start handing over the files from Friday.
Committee chairman James Comer cautioned it would take the department time to compile all of its records and remove information that could identify victims.
Ghislaine Maxwell has claimed Naomi Campbell visited Little Saint James, also known as “Epstein Island”.
The island, in the US Virgin Islands, is understood to be where most of the late financier’s abuse of young women took place. Campbell denies having any knowledge of Epstein’s abuse.
Speaking to Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, Maxwell said: “[Campbell] may have gone – well, she certainly – well, I believe she visited him in Palm Beach, and I believe she may have gone to the island and she may have gone to see his house in New York.
“Whether she went to New Mexico or Paris as well, maybe. They were friends or friendly.”
Flight logs also show Campbell travelling on Epstein’s jet on trips that originate in the US Virgin Islands.
Maxwell also told Mr Blanche that while she believes she met Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker on Epstein’s jet, neither went to the island.
Towards the end of her interview with Todd Blanche, Ghislaine Maxwell interjected to distance Donald Trump from allegations made against Jeffrey Epstein.
“I just would like to put out there that I also focused on how I think the president got swept into some of this unnecessarily, by the way,” she said.
“And I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I certainly don’t subscribe to… everything that I see.
“But I do believe that there is animus in some areas that may have contributed to how the use of the president to harm him, that I find deeply offensive.”
Ghislaine Maxwell said Jeffrey Epstein was angry with her when she called Virginia Giuffre a liar.
Giuffre sued the socialite in 2015 after the accusation.
Maxwell told Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, in July: “I think he [Epstein] was angry that I had even said that I had referred to her being a liar.
“He said I should have not said anything.”
Ghislaine Maxwell told Todd Blanche, deputy attorney general, that she once went dinosaur bone hunting with Jeffrey Epstein and Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is now health and human services secretary.
In testimony that sheds light on her extraordinary lifestyle, she says that RFK Jr knew Epstein.
“How do you know that?” Mr Blanche asked.
“Because we went on a trip together,” she replied. “Dinosaur bone hunting in the Dakotas.”
She added that she never saw anything “inappropriate” with Mr Kennedy.
Ghislaine Maxwell said she did not “deliberately” have any contact with Mossad, the Israeli spy agency.
Some, including the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have suggested Jeffrey Epstein was a spy for Mossad – something that has been fiercely denied by Israel.
Asked by Todd Blanche whether she had ever had any contact with a Mossad agent, Maxwell responded: “Not deliberately”.
She added she would have been “very surprised” if Epstein had received money from Mossad or another intelligence agency, adding: “I don’t believe so, but I wouldn’t no.”
When asked about her relationship with Sarah, Duchess of York, Ghislaine Maxwell described her as a “frenemy”.
She suggested that the Duchess, who was married to Prince Andrew photos for 10 years, was jealous of her friendship with the royal.
Speaking to deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, she said: “I don’t know if she liked me very much. I think my friendship with her ex-husband.
“Well, sometimes she really did like me and sometimes she didn’t. So maybe a frenemy, I don’t know.”
She added: “It was always friendly when we were together, but I think that there was some latent hostility.
“That’s how I felt. That – that is a characterisation of myself. That’s how I felt about her. I would never – I was always friendly with her…I think that – I think that she liked Mr Epstein.”
When asked why she thought so, Maxwell responded: “My female intuition.”
Jeffrey Epstein donated to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s charitable initiatives, Ghislaine Maxwell has claimed.
Speaking to Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, she said the financier “involved himself” with the couple’s Clinton Global Initiative.
When pressed by Mr Blanche on whether that meant he had given money, she responded: “Well, so there’s that. I think he did do that. And that, I believe, the money that he may have given could have been independent of me.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hardline Republican congresswoman, was one of the key Maga voices pushing for the full release of the “Epstein files.” On social media, she is celebrating how Maxwell’s testimony has once again cleared Mr Trump.
“I’ll say it again, the Democrats tried to put President Trump in jail for the rest of his life, destroy his business and take his wealth, and multiple assassins tried to kill him. If there had ever been any evidence against Donald Trump in any of the Epstein case files, the Democrats would’ve used it against him long ago. President Trump has been vindicated once again!!!” she posted.
Ghislaine Maxwell denied that Jeffrey Epstein maintained a “client list” or “black book”.
“There is no list,” she told Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, during their first days of interviews. The FBI and justice department released a memo which drew the same conclusion last month.
Maxwell also claimed Epstein had never worked with her father, despite claims in a BBC documentary from three years ago that Robert Maxwell enlisted the financier’s help in hiding his wealth offshore.
“Absolutely not. I’m a hundred percent sure of that,” she said, asked whether Epstein had ever done business with her father’s companies.
“I never met him. I never saw him. I never heard his name. No.”
Ghislaine Maxwell claimed Elon Musk knew Jeffrey Epstein and the pair emailed one another.
Asked whether Mr Musk knew Epstein, Maxwell said: “I believe they did. And the only reason I say that is not from my memory, but because I saw – I think I saw – my memory is that in discovery, they were communicating on email.”
Asked whether she had any personal knowledge about their relationship, she said “I have no-“.
Ghislaine Maxwell claimed Virginia Giuffre’s allegations against Prince Andrew could not be true because Andrew “had a tie on”.
Asked by Todd Blanche whether she believes the alleged encounter “logistically and physically” could not have happened, Maxwell said: “Well, there’s that. And there’s just – Andrew would – he’s so English. He’s so – he had a tie on.”
Asked again by her lawyer, David Markus, whether there’s any way it could have happened, Maxwell said: “Absolutely not”.
During her interview with the Department of Justice, Ghislaine Maxwell reiterated her claim that Bill Clinton had never visited “Epstein Island.”
Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested the former president Bill Clinton and others had visited Little Saint James, where most of Epstein’s sexual abuse took place.
Speaking to Todd Blanche, she said: “The ex-president [Clinton] never came to the island.”
Flight logs handed over during the investigation into the late financier also contained no evidence that Mr Clinton had visited Little Saint James.
She said later in her interview: “He never. Absolutely never went. And I can be sure of that because there’s no way he would’ve gone – I don’t believe there’s any way that he would’ve gone to the island, had I not been there.
“Because I don’t believe he had an independent friendship, if you will, with Epstein. Did they speak? Did he go? Yes, but that’s very different from going to spend time on an island.”
Ghislaine Maxwell claimed Virginia Guiffre and Prince Andrew could not have had sex in her bathroom because it was too small.
“Where she says that they had relations in a bathroom, I — first of all, the bath is an old Victorian bath. I could — I’m quite — quite small, it’s tight for me”, Maxwell said.
She added: “I put my brother in there to see what would happen. And it looks like a blivet, which is a sausage in like a very tight skin. So her description of whatever the two people were doing in the tub, that wouldn’t work.”
Maxwell said the bathroom is too small to lie flat so it “couldn’t happen on the floor”.
Donald Trump was “crazy” about Ghislaine Maxwell from the very start.
Maxwell, the Oxford-educated daughter of a billionaire publishing tycoon, was exactly the kind of company the future US president liked to keep in New York in the 80s.
The pair were regular fixtures in the elite Manhattan and Palm Beach social scenes, attending the same parties at private clubs and on million-dollar yachts.
More than 30 years later, Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for procuring underage girls for her paedophile ex-boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, and Mr Trump has been returned to the most powerful office in the world for a second time.
The president’s relationship with the couple has become his biggest political liability.
Read more here.
Ghislaine Maxwell said she did not believe Virginia Guiffre’s claim that she slept with Prince Andrew in her bathroom because she failed to mention the “Alice in Wonderland” wall of mirrors that would have made it look like she was sleeping with “5,000 generations of the Royal Family”.
She said: “Then the kicker of all kickers, is that because the bathroom was so small, I decorated it to try make it look huge, which meant that I put mirrors the whole way around it.
“And what was so fun about being in there is that if you stood in the bathroom, you saw like a hundred of you, like you do if you were in”
Interjecting, Maxwell’s lawyer David Markus said: “a fun house”.
Maxwell added: “Yeah, well, Alice in Wonderland or one of those things that you would see yourself going, stretching everything.
“And the image. If you said you were — let’s say you were, let’s say that was telling the truth. She could say she was having sex with 5,000 generations of the Royal Family, because that’s how far back you could see yourself.
“There is no way in God’s green earth if that had taken place, that this is something that you would miss, because it’s — you couldn’t miss it.”
Ghislaine Maxwell has said she never saw anyone behaving inappropriately with a woman “of any age,” although her definition of “inappropriate” could differ from someone else’s.
Speaking to Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, she said: “I never, ever saw any man doing something inappropriate with a woman of any age. I never saw inappropriate habits.
“I’m not going to say hands, I mean, that to me is not inappropriate. Now, somebody’s inappropriate and mine may be different, but…”
Ghislaine Maxwell called Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre’s allegations that she had sex with Prince Andrew in her home in London “rubbish”.
Maxwell said she was at her mother’s 80th birthday party in the country that weekend and said Ms Giuffre’s story “doesn’t hold water”.
“The second reason why — probably maybe even the more important reason than my mum’s birthday, that I think it’s absolute rubbish, is that Prince Andrew.
“The idea of him doing anything of that nature in my house, that’s the size of this room, is so mind-blowingly not conceivable to me, as the man or what — I just can’t — I can’t even — I — no”.
Ghislaine Maxwell said she was not allowed to go to Jeffrey Epstein’s home unless she was “summoned”.
She said: “I don’t know if I told you this before, but I did not have the keys to his – I was not allowed to go to his house, unless I was summoned or told.
“I was not allowed to answer his phones. We can go there, but anyway. So this – you can tell there’s a bit of a sore point, perhaps.”
Asked what had happened with Prince Andrew’s and Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship, Ghislaine Maxwell said: “Okay. So after that, at some point Jeffrey told me – Epstein told me that Andrew was coming to New York and I needed to organise the whole thing.
“That’s classic by the way, classic Epstein. Of course, if someone – I’m like, all right, fine, whatever. And because he wanted to make sure that Andrew was taken care of and that he was comfortable, he had whatever he needed, yada, yada, yada.
“And I’m like, well, am I going to meet him or are you just going to have me do all the job?
“And he said, well, you know, you can come and say hello. Like, wow. Well, that’s so nice of you, for real.”
Ghislaine Maxwell said she thought the Duchess of York “pushed” Jeffrey Epstein to become friends and was “trying to put the moves” on Epstein.
“I think Sarah [Ferguson] is the one that pushed that. And they met and hung out, I want to say two or three times that had nothing to do with me”, she said.
“I wasn’t communicating with Andrew, I wasn’t in touch with him. And I know this because I was annoyed and I felt left out, and I felt disrespected and I was like, this is weird. I couldn’t even imagine Epstein and Andrew together.”
She added: “And I thought that Sarah was trying to put the moves on Jeffrey, if I’m being honest, and I thought the whole thing was annoying and I was p—-d off.”
Ghislaine Maxwell has said that Jeffrey Epstein did not ever love her and that she wasn’t his “type”.
Speaking to Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, she said: “There was some indications that [Epstein] would actively tell other people to lie to me or conceal things from me, and that he never loved me and I wasn’t his type.”
The pair had a romantic relationship but after breaking up continued to work together until his arrest in 2019.
Ghislaine Maxwell was also asked whether she believed the official account of Epstein’s death, that he had died by suicide in his cell.
“I do not believe he died by suicide, no,” she said.
She said she did not know who was behind his death but that it was not a difficult thing to arrange.
“In prison, where I am, they will kill you or they will pay – somebody can pay a prisoner to kill you for $25 worth of commissary. That’s about the going rate for a hit with a lock today.”
Ghislaine Maxwell said she would have never have thought to introduce Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein because they were like chalk and cheese”.
Pressed by Todd Blanche on whether it was Prince Andrew himself who suggested he met Epstein through Maxwell, she said: “I think that’s true.”
Maxwell’s lawyer then interjected asking: “It’s true that Andrew said that”.
Maxwell replied: “Yeah, no, I’m sure it’s true, because I – I’m English and my close friends are all close friends with Sarah and Andrew. And I would not say that I was close friends with Andrew before, but certainly we were friendly and certainly his best friends, some of them, are very close with me. And I think that my friendship, my – me being present or me is what made Andrew like Jeffrey more, like, trust him or I think that’s the idea.”
Mr Blanche responded: “So you don’t dispute that you’re — that you kind of had a role in them getting together. You’re just saying you didn’t say, Prince, here’s Jeffrey.”
Maxwell said she “would never have introduced them”.
“It would never have occurred to me to introduce them. I couldn’t imagine them being friends. Two chalk and cheeses would never – I mean, for real, there’s nothing there to connect them.
“So he met Prince Andrew and then he had a really good relationship. I don’t like that word. It sounds clunky.”
During her interview with the DoJ, Ghislaine Maxwell apparently feared she would be charged with insider trading before realising that her lawyer was joking with her.
During a discussion with Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, about her work as a day trader, Maxwell said Epstein was impressed by her instinct and that she had invested in Apple “when nobody liked Apple”.
At which point, her lawyer David Markus interjects to say: “Don’t charge her with insider trading,” at which point Maxwell appears to panic, telling them; “Please – no. I’m not trying to suggest that. Oh, goodness. Please, no, I had no…”
Her lawyer then cuts in to tell her: “It was just a joke”.
Ghislaine Maxwell said she did not introduce Prince Andrew to Jeffrey Epstein.
“First of all, let’s just state, I did not introduce him to Prince Andrew. I did not introduce him to Prince Andrew or to Sarah Ferguson. That is a flat untruth. I’ll start with that,” Maxwell said.
She added: “So, the allegation, I have to go with the allegation. The allegation was that at my house in London, in March, whatever that was, 2001 I believe, we went to London, especially so that [REDACTION] could have a – or [REDACTION] could have a relationship with Prince Andrew and she was paid a vast amount of money for that purpose.”
Maxwell said Prince Andrew met Epstein at the house rented by a client called Lynn Forester.
“So Lynn Forester, who was a client or some type of client, or I think she actually tried to date him or might have dated him, for the record”, Maxwell said.
She added: “She had a house or she rented a house in the Vineyard. I think it was in the Vineyard or Nantucket, I can’t remember now which one it was. It was one of those. It was either in Nantucket or the Vineyard, and invited Epstein to go, and I believe that’s when he met Prince Andrew.”
Ghislaine Maxwell did not recall Donald Trump sending a lewd letter featuring a drawing of a nude woman for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Mr Trump had submitted a note for an album Maxwell was assembling for her then-boyfriend’s birthday, in which he told Epstein they had “certain things in common” and concluded: “May every day be another wonderful secret”.
Mr Trump has fiercely denied writing or sending the letter and has launched legal proceedings against the newspaper and its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch.
“I do not remember,” Maxwell answered, when asked by deputy attorney general Todd Blanche whether Mr Trump had sent a message for Epstein’s 50th birthday. She added that she had not found a birthday letter from the president among her possessions in New York.
However, she confirmed she had put together a book of birthday messages for Epstein, and that the financier had told her: “I love that idea.”
Ghislaine Maxwell claimed that she got her banking license while working for Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaking to deputy attorney general Todd Blanch, Maxwell said that, although Epstein was incredibly wealthy, she liked to earn a salary “for my self esteem”.
She went on to say that, as well as working for the financier, she trained to become a banker.
“Here’s another example of something that you guys wouldn’t have known about is I became a banker. I got my Series 63, Series 67 banking license and became a broker,” she told Mr Blanche.
“And then – because I was day trading… I think I was lucky more than smart, but I made quite a lot of money doing that.”
Ghisline Maxwell was paid $250,000 per year by Jeffrey Epstein, she claimed in her interview.
During her prison interview with Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, he said that she was “kind of on a payroll, for want of a better word”.
Mr Blanche said Maxwell told him the pay was “around $25,000 and ending up at around $250,000 per year.” Although the pair’s relationship began romantically, the British socialite later worked for the financier, managing his properties and hiring staff.
In the transcript from their first day of interviews in Tallahassee, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche confirmed for the tape that he and Ghislaine Maxwell had spoken off the record.
“So before we started recording, we met for a few minutes. I introduced myself and we chatted and now I’ve told you that we were going on the record,” he said.
“And before we start asking questions, I know that you’ve been given, by your lawyer, a copy of what’s called a proffer agreement. And I just want to spend two minutes making sure that you understand what – what governs our conversation today.”
Ghislaine Maxwell confirmed that Bill Clinton travelled frequently with Jeffrey Epstein on his plane, but never received a massage.
“So they spent time on the plane together, and I don’t believe there was ever a massage on the plane,” she said.
“So that would’ve been the only time that I think that President Clinton could have even received a massage. And he didn’t, because I was there.”
Ghislaine Maxwell had suggested that she may have recruited massesuses from Mar-a-Lago to work for Jeffrey Epstein.
The former girlfriend of the late paedophile financier told Todd Blanche, the deputy Attorney General, that “it’s not impossible that I might have asked someone from there,” although she added that she couldn’t recall if she ever had.
Donald Trump has previously suggested he threw the late paedophile financier out of his Mar-a-Lago club and did not talk to him “for years” after he poached people who worked for him.
Speaking to reporters at his golf club in Turnberry, Scotland, during a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer, he was asked about why he ended his years-long friendship with Epstein.
“For years, I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein. I wouldn’t talk because he did something that was inappropriate..
“He stole people that work for me. I said, ‘don’t ever do that again’. He did it again, and I threw him out of the place, persona non grata. I threw him out, and that was it.”
Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, alleged that she was recruited and forced to give the financier sexual massages while working as a teenager at the Florida resort.
This is the key paragraph from Ghislaine Maxwell on Donald Trump. He was a gentlemen at all times, she told Todd Blanche.
“I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”
Hello and welcome to the live blog. We’ll be bringing you the latest updates as our team goes through the transcripts of the Ghislaine Maxwell interview released by the justice department.
