Democrats Press Trump Administration On Mysterious Ghislaine Maxwell Prison Transfer

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WASHINGTON ― The Justice Department has to explain why Jeffrey Epstein’s sole convicted co-conspirator won a transfer to a cushy federal prison camp last year, Democrats told Bureau of Prisons Director William Marshall in a letter on Monday.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act specifically requires the government to release all documents related to Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in Epstein’s *** abuse schemes. The text of the statute doesn’t distinguish between documents from her criminal case and anything more recent.

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That means the Justice Department is legally required to put out any documents “related to her transfer to a minimum-security prison camp where she has been granted numerous unusual special privileges,” Reps. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said in a letter to Marshall.

The Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Justice Department, transferred Maxwell from a low-security facility in Florida to a minimum security prison camp in Texas. The transfer happened days after Deputy U.S. Attorney Todd Blanche conducted an unusual interview with Maxwell last year in which she said she never witnessed President Donald Trump behave improperly when she, he and Epstein were all partying together in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“I have now had two conversations with the survivors, and they do not feel like they have gotten justice, and Ghislaine Maxwell getting special treatment is re-traumatizing to them,” Ross told HuffPost.

Under questioning from Ross at a House Judiciary Committee hearing last month, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had nothing to do with Maxwell’s transfer. And Bondi claimed, falsely, that Maxwell had been transferred to a facility with the same security profile.

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“She was transferred, I learned, after the fact, to the same level facility, and that is a question for the Bureau of Prisons. I was not involved in that at all,” Bondi said.

(Lying under oath is a crime, one that Bondi’s Justice Department tried to prosecute, unsuccessfully, against former FBI director James Comey.)

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Maxwell is seeking a pardon or commutation of her prison sentence from Trump, who hasn’t ruled it out. Trump said “I just wish her well” when she was charged with *** trafficking crimes in 2020, a year after Epstein’s death.

The Justice Department has withheld a significant amount of material from the public Epstein Library it set up in January to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, including FBI forms memorializing agents’ interviews with a woman who claimed in 2019 that Trump sexually abused her in the early 1980s. (The accuser has reportedly faced fraud and theft charges in unrelated cases.)

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The Bureau of Prisons has confirmed Maxwell was transferred but never explained why. There do not appear to be any documents relating to the transfer in the Epstein Library except for an August 2025 FBI news summary memo that mentioned a news story about the controversial transfer.

The documents should already be public, Ross said. “The fact that we have to write a letter to follow up on this is ridiculous.”

Correction: *An earlier version of this story misstated to whom Democrats addressed their letter. It was sent to Bureau of Prisons Director William Marshall.*