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For the second time since Todd Blanche interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, Donald Trump affirmed this morning that he is “allowed” to pardon the convicted sex trafficker.
As former Justice Department pardon attorney Liz Oyer noted in an interview on Substack Live, Trump’s ability to pardon Maxwell was never in question. The decency of considering it was.
“We have to remember in Maxwell's case, she was convicted of five felony counts, all involving the sexual exploitation of minor children,” said Oyer, who was fired after refusing to give domestic abuser Mel Gibson back his gun rights.
Pointing out that Maxwell still has most of her 20-year sentence left to serve, Oyer said: “It would be stunning for a president to pardon someone like that.”
In normal times, a clemency application for a defendant like Maxwell would have been a non-starter. Maxwell’s lawyer David Markus recently denied at a press conference making any formal request to the Trump administration, but Oyer noted that any pardon applications that were taken seriously would involve outreach to the victims.
“One thing that we would do in every single case where we were considering making a recommendation to the president to look at it is ask for input from the victims,” Oyer reflected of her tenure leading the pardon office. “That's what really has been so shockingly overlooked here. Nobody is talking about how the victims may feel even by these discussions being had.”
Attorneys for hundreds of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims have spoken out about the Justice Department’s failure to notify them about trying to unseal grand jury records and reach out to Maxwell.
In her recently published article “Now is not the time for anonymity,” Oyer wrote about being the one named source in a CBS News article calling Todd Blanche’s two-day interview of Maxwell “unorthodox.” Oyer noted that this puts it mildly. Blanche is the second highest official inside the Justice Department—and Trump’s former criminal defense attorney. The former fact makes Blanche’s overture bizarre, at best, and the latter fact makes it, to quote
, indefensible.In the video above, Oyer explains why so many former prosecutors shied away from offering even “mild” criticism of Blanche’s actions: “I think it's a sad reflection on how effective Trump has been in scaring lawyers into submission.”
Before she testified before Congress, Oyer recalled learning that two armed special deputy U.S. Marshals were on their way to her home to deliver a warning: “My heart stopped,” she recalled.
But Oyer still showed up to testify.
“I don't like to be bullied and I didn't want to set a precedent that those sorts of bullying tactics could work,” she said.
If Congress eventually hears testimony on the Epstein matter, Oyer said she would much rather hear from the case’s now-fired lead prosecutor Maurene Comey and the victims, not Maxwell.
Watch the full video at the top of the newsletter.
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