Ghislaine Maxwell won't answer questions before Congress without clemency from Trump, attorney says

Molly Crane-Newman, New York Daily News on Jan 21, 2026

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Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell will have nothing to offer when she testifies before Congress next month unless she’s first granted clemency by President Donald Trump, her lawyer said Wednesday.

In a letter sent Tuesday to Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee probing Epstein, Maxwell’s attorney said she’d answer questions at her Feb. 5 deposition only in exchange for a get-out-of-jail-free card from the president.

“If Ms. Maxwell were to receive clemency, she would be willing — and eager — to testify openly and honestly, in public, before Congress in Washington, D.C. She welcomes the opportunity to share the truth and to dispel the many misconceptions and misstatements that have plagued this case from the beginning,” lawyer David Markus wrote in the letter, which he provided to the Daily News.

Otherwise, Markus wrote, Maxwell would plead the Fifth Amendment to “invoke her privilege against self-incrimination and decline to answer questions.”

Comer announced at a committee hearing Wednesday that lawmakers had succeeded in nailing down a date for a deposition with the British former socialite who procured victims for Epstein.

Almost five years since she was found guilty of facilitating Epstein’s sexual exploitation of young women and girls, Maxwell is serving out her 20-year sentence at a prison camp in Texas, having managed last year to get out of a maximum-security facility in Florida.

Her transfer came after an unusual set of interviews with Todd Blanche, the second-in-command at the Justice Department and Trump’s former personal lawyer, in which she spoke flatteringly of Trump.

The convicted sex trafficker, 64, who holds British, U.S. and French citizenship, has found a cushier setup but is no closer to getting out of prison. She’s currently representing herself in a last-ditch legal effort to have her sentence thrown out; her appeal efforts reached a dead end last year, when the Supreme Court refused to consider overturning her conviction.

Comer’s announcement Wednesday came at a committee hearing to consider holding former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton in contempt over their decision not to comply with a subpoena to testify in the House probe into the government’s handling of the Epstein case.

Clinton press secretary Angel Ureña issued a statement on X, saying the former president had been cooperative and agreed to meet Comer and Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., the committee’s ranking member, in Clinton’s New York office to take questions related to Epstein. The statement said the GOP-controlled committee wouldn’t agree to the boundaries Clinton proposed.

“(Both) Clintons have been out of office for over a decade. Neither had anything to do with (Epstein) for more than 20 years,” the statement read. “The Committee is voting whether to charge the Clintons with a crime that could end in their imprisonment. But we have cooperated.”

The scandal over what remains unknown about Epstein’s ties to powerful people and who may have participated in his staggering abuse has dogged Trump in his second term like few others.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act that the president signed in November has not lived up to its name. Only a fraction of the materials the Justice Department was to release by Dec. 19 have been made public, and were full of redactions.

The Manhattan federal judge who presides over Maxwell’s case denied Wednesday a request from Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., to intervene and push for a special master to oversee the remainder of the materials’ release.

Judge Paul Engelmayer said the lawmakers were right to be concerned, but that he had no authority to issue the requested remedy.

Bill Clinton, who was friends with Epstein for years, was featured in a sizable number of photos in the tranches of Epstein files released by the Justice Department thus far. He has long maintained that he was unaware of what Epstein was doing to young girls and cut ties with him when he found out.

Trump, who was close friends with Epstein for decades, late last year ordered the Justice Department to investigate the financier’s relationship with Bill Clinton and other prominent Democrats.

But in a bombshell Vanity Fair interview last month, Trump’s White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said there was nothing that incriminated Clinton in the Epstein files.

“The president was wrong about that,” Wiles said.

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