President Donald Trump's options to mitigate potentially "the biggest political scandal in American history" are getting fewer by the day, according to a new piece in Mother Jones.
Currently on the table is a possible Trump pardon for Jeffrey Epstein's former girlfriend Ghislane Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years for sex trafficking — a move that experts claim would be devastating to Republicans running in the midterm elections.
In addition, Maxwell's attorney presented House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) with immunity demands if they want her to spill her secrets in a congressional hearing.
Author and journalist Mike Rothschild told Mother Jones, "Even the fact that it’s possible Maxwell might get clemency or some kind of voided conviction is shaping up to be one of the biggest political scandals in American history.”
Other options to "divert attention" away from Trump's association with Epstein, according to senior reporter Anna Merlan, include simply declaring "the story to be over—something that’s so far had limited success."
"Another clear possibility is that the administration finds an internal scapegoat to blame the Epstein mess on," Merlan wrote. "That would most likely be Attorney General Pam Bondi; as the face of the Justice Department, Bondi has been the target of the most focused MAGA outrage."
The administration could consider a "large document dump" of the Epstein files to quell critics, but Merlan posited that option "carries significant privacy risks, as well as legal ones," in addition to potentially further exposing the president's relationship with Epstein.
"The fifth and most likely option is a version of what is already playing out, to limited success: trying to find another scandal that will appeal to—and distract—the MAGA base," Merlan wrote. So far, however, Trump's demands to criminally prosecute his enemies, including John Brennan, James Comey, and even former President Barack Obama, have fallen flat.