By Daniel Richman
Mr. Richman a former federal prosecutor.
Readers will surely have varying views about whether the Jeffrey Epstein matter should be dominating political discourse. But the Trump administration’s attempt to tamp down the controversy by reviewing its files, interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell and otherwise attempting to show it has nothing to hide brings into sharp relief the damage it has done to the Justice Department and its credibility.
From the start, President Trump appears to have put personal loyalty above all in the leaders he chose for the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And he seems to have succeeded in that regard. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel — all have shown a North Korean level of fealty to their leader. Ignoring norms of Justice Department independence from the White House, they have jumped to follow his orders. They’ve announced investigations he demanded, seemingly regardless of whether there was support for doing so. They have moved to dismiss the cases that suited his political or personal purposes, regardless of the public interest.
What is truly extraordinary, at least in recent times, has been their readiness to fire or otherwise push out agents and prosecutors, apparently for sins as minor as associating with Mr. Trump’s critics and taking assignments to prosecute Jan. 6 defendants.
Numerous federal judges have raised concerns, to put it mildly, about the Trump administration’s readiness to put political expediency and presidential will above professionalism and adherence to the rule of law. Justice Department lawyers in every administration often find themselves fighting uphill battles in court to advance the president’s political agenda. But even when they don’t have the law squarely on their side, they generally start with a personal and institutional credibility without which their work would be much harder.
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If a Trump Justice Department lawyer appears before a court and either doesn’t know an answer because the political bosses have withheld it, or, worse, is not fully candid or even lies, she becomes just another lawyer, and a sleazy one at that. The government’s case suffers accordingly, as it should.
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The credibility crisis is not just inside the courtroom. Having supposedly scoured its files on Jeffrey Epstein, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department have told the public that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” for good and sufficient reasons. No one is fooled by the lack of any official’s name on the written statement. It comes from Ms. Bondi’s Justice Department and Mr. Patel’s F.B.I. — organizations whose lawyers and agents have seen colleagues pushed out for the mere suspicion of insufficient loyalty. How can these institutions show that they are not simply protecting the president?
The Trump Justice Department’s latest attempt to put the Epstein matter to rest is to see what Ghislaine Maxwell has to say. Ms. Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking charges relating to Mr. Epstein and is seeking to have her case overturned. Were she interested in sharing her account voluntarily (whether truthful or not), she could have done that long ago. Presumably, she will want some consideration for sharing it now. Recent reporting indicates the Justice Department offered Ms. Maxwell conditional immunity for her new testimony.
The president could offer her a pardon, and recently noted he’d be “allowed” to do that. Alternatively, he could promise a commutation, which would reduce her sentence but leave her conviction. Those approaches would undoubtedly raise a political firestorm, since leniency for someone convicted of aiding Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking surely would not be popular. Perhaps the administration is willing to pay that price to show its apparent interest in full disclosure.
In any case, what should we make of any account Ms. Maxwell gives, whether in hopes of a pardon, commutation or some other form of judicial relief? If what she says now roughly follows what the government turned over to her lawyer in discovery or what it presented at her trial, does that mean that’s all she knows? Or does it mean that she has decided to conceal additional information, perhaps about the president, perhaps not?
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Say she is willing to speak about a wide range of new matters, maybe involving the president. What confidence should we have that Trump Justice Department officials will push her hard to be truthful and candid? Or that they will report back everything she said?
The answer to the last set of questions is probably “none.” The meeting with Ms. Maxwell is said to have been organized by Mr. Blanche, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, who seems like he continues to take his former job seriously. Perhaps Mr. Blanche will address his credibility problem by including career Justice Department lawyers or F.B.I. agents in the Maxwell interview process and any subsequent decisions about releasing information from it. Obtaining truthful testimony from an accomplice witness is a sensitive enough task in the best of circumstances. How confident can the public be that prosecutors and agents would focus on the truth and not their careers?
I know scores of Justice Department lawyers with extraordinary personal integrity who would put their commitment to truth and justice without fear or favor above any concern about job security. There are also some Justice Department officials I personally wouldn’t trust at all.
But this isn’t about me. The Trump Justice Department needs someone with the credibility to tell the general public, “yes, there is some material that for legal reasons we cannot share, but really there’s nothing to see here.” There will always be conspiracy theorists who would never believe the government. Many other Americans expect and want the truth from this Justice Department. The unavoidable problem for the Trump administration is how it has poisoned the well it now wants to draw from.