President Donald Trump’s administration is weighing the release of an audio recording of the Justice Department’s recent interview with Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, senior administration officials told CNN and Fox News on Tuesday.
The reports come days after Maxwell, who’s serving a 20-year sex-trafficking sentence, was transferred from a Florida federal prison to a lower-security facility in Texas without explanation, fueling criticism of the Trump administration’s lack of transparency around the Epstein case and raising questions about a potential deal with Maxwell.
“A final decision has not been made,” one of the officials told CNN. Another said that if the recording were released, it likely would be in the next few weeks.
White House spokesperson Steven Cheung dismissed the reports in a statement to HuffPost.
Trump told Newsmax on Friday that he’d “like to release everything, but we don’t want people to get hurt that shouldn’t be hurt.”
The Justice Department declined to comment.
The recordings would come from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell last month, which the Justice Department promoted as an effort to dispense more information about the Epstein case to the public. Blanche said the Justice Department would “share additional information about what we learned [from her] at the appropriate time.”
The meeting came as Trump and DOJ officials remained under immense scrutiny for reneging on promises to release the rest of the Epstein files ― documents they’ve used to rile up Trump’s base for years.
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Part of the debate about releasing audio of the interviews, sources told the outlets Tuesday, centers around whether doing so would push the controversy further into the spotlight.
Last week, Maxwell’s lawyer wrote in a letter to members of Congress seeking Maxwell’s testimony that she’d be willing to speak in exchange for a pardon or commutation from the president. Trump didn’t rule out the possibility when asked about it last month, simply saying he’s “allowed” to issue one to her.