Here’s a simple question to ask Attorney General Pam Bondi at her congressional hearing Wednesday: Why was Todd Blanche the one to conduct a proffer of Ghislaine Maxwell?
Blanche, the highest-ranking Justice Department official under Bondi and a former Donald Trump defense lawyer, led the interviews of the convicted Jeffrey Epstein associate over the summer. The deputy attorney general said that he reached out to Maxwell at Bondi’s direction.
But on top of Blanche’s enduring allegiance to Trump and the clear conflict it creates, he was an odd choice to question Maxwell about any actionable Epstein-related information she might have — that is, if the point was to properly collect and analyze such information.
The truth does matter. That’s why Blanche was the wrong one to purportedly seek it in this situation.
Though it might seem like sending in a high-ranking official puts more legal muscle behind the endeavor, the opposite is true when it comes to conducting proffer sessions. That’s because those interviews are typically led by the prosecutors who have actually worked on the cases and investigations at issue, as they’d know what to ask and how to assess the value of the defendant’s answers.
Therefore, between Blanche’s loyalty to Trump and the fact that he wasn’t well-positioned to conduct the inquiry, he was doomed to fail in any competent and respectable investigation. While he wasn’t naive about the situation, it still falls under Bondi’s purview as attorney general, and it’s therefore a proper avenue of congressional oversight examination.
Unsurprisingly, the published transcripts and audio of Blanche’s conversations with Maxwell showed that at least one of his priorities — perhaps his sole priority — was to try to exonerate Trump. Indeed, there seemed to be an unspoken understanding of that purpose between Blanche and Maxwell.
“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,” the convicted child sex trafficker told him. She was subsequently moved to a minimum-security facility. The Supreme Court declined to review her appeal, and she faces a 2037 release date.
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Jordan Rubin
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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