Inside the depositions that sparked Ghislaine Maxwell’s perjury charges

Ghislaine Maxwell's two-day interview by Trump's DOJ renewed interest in why prosecutors indicted her with two counts of lying under oath. Here's a breakdown.

Placard from press conference announcing Ghislaine Maxwell’s 2020 arrest. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Note:

For the second night in a row, I will be appearing on CNN’s Laura Coates Live tonight to discuss my coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cases.

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After sitting down for two days with Donald Trump’s former criminal defense attorney turned deputy attorney general, Ghislaine Maxwell sent her lawyer to start angling for a presidential pardon.

“The president this morning said he had the power to do so,” Maxwell’s lawyer David Markus said today, referring to Trump’s refusal to rule out a pardon for his client. “We hope he exercises that power in the right and just way."

Markus made those comments after Maxwell’s two-day interview session with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Trump in his criminal cases.

The Justice Department fired Maxwell’s prosecutor Maurene Comey days before Blanche’s highly unusual decision to interview the incarcerated Maxwell while she has a pending petition before the Supreme Court.

On Thursday night, I appeared on CNN’s Laura Coates Live, where the panel discussed the bizarre spectacle of the Justice Department’s No. 2 official interviewing a convicted sex trafficker and tweeting about it on social media.

During the discussion, Maxwell’s perjury charges repeatedly came up, and it’s worth revisiting why prosecutors found that she has a habit of lying under oath.

The two perjury charges, which were dropped after Maxwell’s conviction for sex trafficking to avoid the need for a second trial, stem from a pair of depositions in a defamation lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most outspoken victims who died by suicide earlier this year.

Prosecutors never stopped believing that they could prove Maxwell repeatedly lied under oath, and this breakdown of the trial record reveals the reason for their confidence.