The audio and transcript of a two-day meeting between President Donald Trump's Justice Department and Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, didn't pass the smell test for a former FBI official.
Andrew McCabe, who served as the deputy director of the FBI from 2016 to 2018, joined "OutFront" with anchor Erin Burnett on Friday evening for a discussion on Maxwell's interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Burnett noted to McCabe that Maxwell's first mention of Trump in the interview with Blanche came "unprompted."
"He didn't even have to ask about him for her to bring him up. And then we played some of the things she went on to say in the most glowing terms, you know, calling him president, not by his name. And you actually say that that's not a coincidence, that the fact that she kept referring to him as president and not by his actual name?" she asked
McCabe said the exchange stuck out to him.
"Yeah, I just think the entire thing, Erin, is so curious. It's so suspicious. When you listen to the tapes, you get the sense that Ghislaine Maxwell went into that room knowing what information she had to deliver to get their attention and to get their approval and to get some sort of benefit that she is pursuing from the administration," he said.
Blanche, he said, went into the room knowing what information he needed.
"Which was what she was going to say about Donald Trump's involvement or noninvolvement. And both sides delivered to each other's satisfaction," he said.
McCabe agreed that Maxwell, unprompted, spoke "glowingly of the president, referred to him only in the most respectful term" — which is how Trump wants to be treated.
To boot, there were no line agents or investigators in the room who could serve as witnesses to what transpired in an extraordinarily rare interview between a possible government cooperator and and the deputy attorney general.
" It's recorded and then immediately released to the public, which is not something you would ever do with the testimony of somebody who you were considering turning into a cooperator. Nothing about this process was conventional or normal, but it does seem that both the administration and Ghislaine Maxwell got exactly what they wanted from it," he concluded.
Watch the clip below or at this link.
