It’s the strange little details that give it away – the haste, the lack of planning and, dare I say it, the sheer incompetence behind the scenes when it comes to this week’s meeting between President Trump’s deputy Attorney General and Ghislaine Maxwell.
I can disclose, for example, that the interview with Maxwell, one of the most high profile felons in the American penal system, was originally scheduled to take place inside the tough Florida jail where she is serving her 20-year sentence for child sex offences.
But the plan to see her behind bars collapsed in farce when it emerged that the Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institute had no table big enough to accommodate the seven people planning to attend.
I’m told that the prison authorities couldn’t even fix the problem by pushing two tables together because the furniture is secured to the floor – to prevent the prisoners wielding tables and chairs as weapons.
That’s why the remarkable interview, now in its second day, was transferred instead to the Tallahassee Courthouse.
Maxwell was placed in leg irons and three-point handcuffs for her journey from jail to the meeting at the courthouse, despite a specific request from Maxwell’s camp that they leave her free.
The handcuffs, I understand, left her bruised and bleeding.
On Friday, Maxwell lawyer David Oscar Markus told reporters that his client answered questions about ‘100 different people’ linked to Epstein.
I’ve been in close touch with Maxwell and her team ever since, with The Mail on Sunday, we obtained a series of world-exclusive behind-bars interviews, before and soon after her conviction in 2022.
(Two of these interviews, taped and approved by the prison authorities, are yet to be released.)
What I have learned is that Maxwell is intelligent, direct and answers the questions she is asked. It’s a mystery to me why the federal authorities have waited until now to talk to her. She’s been willing all along. And if Maxwell has something to hide, a ‘smoking gun,’ I got no sense of it at all.
I can tell you this, too: I have spoken to someone very close to the president who told me bluntly that the White House is not getting involved in the Florida theatricals. That Trump is ‘leaving everything to the DOJ so they can hang themselves.’
Much is expected of Ms Maxwell, 63, who was found by the courts to have enabled the campaign of sexual abuse that her late friend and lover, Jeffrey Epstein, waged against young girls.
In particular, the Justice Department wants to establish exactly what Ms Maxwell knows about long-running claims of a conspiracy between senior politicians, financiers and public figures who, it is widely alleged, joined Epstein in the abuse and then covered up the evidence.
Epstein died in jail in New York in 2019, apparently committing suicide before he could be sentenced for his crimes.
Trump himself has again been dragged into the controversy following recent allegations in the Wall Street Journal that he contributed a lewd birthday message to his friend Epstein – a greeting included in a special ‘book’ compiled by Maxwell and presented to the financier as a birthday gift.
Trump, of course, fiercely denies having written any such message – and any wrongdoing – and is suing the WSJ and its owner Rupert Murdoch for $10billion.
Meanwhile, Americans who believe the claims of a conspiracy hope fervently that she will spill details of the supposed high-level corruption and the ‘truth’, whatever that might be.