In the wake of Ghislaine Maxwell’s interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche being released to the public and readers discovering that Ghislaine had said Trump was only socially friendly with Epstein and did nothing untoward with him, Congressman Jamie Rasking (D-MD) went berserk and declared the whole thing was made up and whitewashed.
As background, at one point in the interview, Blanche asked Ghislaine, “What about Mr. Epstein’s relationship with him?” She explained that they at least appeared friendly when together, and Blanche then pressed, “Was that in social settings or was that in private settings?” Ghislaine said it was all in public: “I believe I only ever saw them in social settings. I don’t recall any private settings.”
Then, after the two went back and forth about Mar-a-Lago and whether she and Epstein visited it for a while, Deputy AG Blanche pressed the former Epstein associate on whether she saw Trump get one of the infamous massages from the Epstein girls, asking, “Did you ever observe President Trump receive a massage?” Ghislaine responded, “Never.”
Continuing, she said that Trump never went to Epstein’s house as far as she knows, noting, “I think they were friendly like people are in social settings. I don’t — I don’t think they were close friends or I certainly never witnessed the President in any of –I don’t recall ever seeing him in his house, for instance.”
Concluding, she added that she never saw Trump get inappropriate or get a massage, saying, “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.”
It was over all of that commentary from Ghislaine, released as part of a transcript that only edited out the names of victims, so as to protect them, that Rep. Raskin went berserk on TV and declared that it was a fraudulent interview meant to whitewash the president’s behavior.
Raskin’s commentary came after the MSNBC host, Chris Hayes, asked him about the interview and whether it could be trusted. He started off by saying, “Congressman, today we have this Maxwell interview, the transcript and the audio. I want to say we don’t know if it’s complete. And I saw some reporting indicating there was an off-the-record portion that Todd Blanche had with Maxwell.”
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Continuing, Hayes suggested that important things might have been hidden, saying, “I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I also know we don’t know if it’s the, you know, four corners of everything that was said. And then we got the first 33,000 documents, I guess, that are going to the oversight committee. Your reaction to all those?”
Replying, Raskin declared that the whole thing was a “performance” and is meant to cover up important details. He began, “It’s really an astonishing performance because contrary to everything that was found at trial and everything we know, Ghislaine Maxwell basically accused the underage victims of lying.”
Continuing, he declared, “She said that she never saw inappropriate sexual contact between Epstein and underage girls, and, of course, gave a clean bill of health to President Trump, which is what that was all about, and complimented his rise to power and so on. So, you know, I think people can see this for what it is. It’s an absolute whitewash and a cover-up.”
Featured image credit: Ghislaine maxwell pic By Ghislaine Maxwell – I. Maxwell, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15965324