NEW: Ghislaine Maxwell Vindicates Trump In DOJ Interview

Ghislaine Maxwell, the former mistress of notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein who was convicted of trafficking Epstein’s victims, reiterated that President Donald Trump was “never” involved in any of Epstein’s crimes while speaking with the Justice Department.

Maxwell recently sat for an interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche at a Tallahassee federal prison, where she was being held until recently. The convicted sex trafficker was granted limited immunity from further prosecution when agreeing to the interview, provided she did not tell verifiable lies.

When speaking with Blanche, Maxwell noted that Epstein and Trump did have a cordial relationship until 2004, when the disgraced financier was barred from Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate after he inappropriately talked to an underage employee.

“I think they were friendly, like people are in social settings. I don’t — I don’t think they were close friends or I certainly never witnessed the President in any of — I don’t recall ever seeing him in his house, for instance,” Maxwell told Blanche.

“I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting. 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.”

Blanche spoke with Maxwell at a federal corrections facility in Tallahassee last month, where she is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking.

Maxwell explained that she first met Trump in the 1990s through her father, saying Trump was “always very cordial and very kind to me.”

“Well, I just want to say for my relationship with President Trump — relationship’s a big word — but I just want to say that I met him or I believe I may have, because of my father in the ’90s,” she said.

“Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me,” she continued. “And I just want to say that I find … I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve always liked him. So that is the sum and substance of my entire relationship with him.”

As for Epstein, Maxwell stated that she only ever saw him speaking with Trump in social settings and did not believe they were particularly close. “I don’t know how they met, and I don’t know how they became friends,” she told Blanche. “I certainly saw them together and I remember the few times I observed them together, but they were friendly. I mean, they seemed friendly.”

“I believe I only ever saw them in social settings,” she continued. “I don’t recall any private settings.”

Maxwell and Epstein speak with Bill Clinton in 1993

Maxwell further told Blanche that she last saw Trump in a social setting at some point in the mid-2000’s. When asked whether she had ever seen Trump do anything inappropriate with “masseuses or with anybody in your world,” she gave a firm denial.

“Absolutely never, in any context,” she responded.

Towards the end of the interview — transcripts and recordings of which were uploaded to the DOJ’s website — Maxwell asked Blanche to note that she believes Trump was “swept up” into the Epstein controversy.

“I just would like to put out there that I also focused on how I think the president got swept into some of this unnecessarily, by the way,” she said. “And I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I certainly don’t subscribe to all the — all of everything that I see. But I do believe that there is animus in some areas that may have contributed to how the use of the president to harm him, that I find deeply offensive.”

“And whilst I can’t obviously say definitively that that is what it is, I would like to show you what I see so that you can evaluate it and do with that as you see fit if it needs to be addressed. I’ve seen it, it struck me, and I would like to give it to you,” she continued.

Elsewhere in the interview, Maxwell denied the existence of a “client list” and reiterated her belief that Epstein did not commit suicide. When asked who could have killed him, she did not provide a definitive answer, instead suggesting that extreme violence is common in American prisons.