'Who are the innocent people?' Expert challenged to explain Trump's latest excuse

An author who has examined Jeffery Epstein's network knocked down President Donald Trump's latest excuse for holding back the release of the late sex offender's files.

Author Barry Levine appeared Sunday afternoon on MSNBC, where he discussed the unusual transfer of the late Epstein's accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security facility in Texas after her meetings with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

"This is certainly special treatment that's taking place, and it is so wrong," said Levin, the author of "The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell." "When she was sentenced back in 2022, the U.S. attorney at the time said she committed heinous crimes against children. Now, she shouldn't be in this dormitory-style lockup down in Bryan, texas. She should be doing hard time.I would think that all the victims out there and there's actually more than a thousand would be very upset with the fact that she's been given some leniency in being moved from the lockup, where she was in Tallahassee, Florida, to Texas."

"This Texas place is not suited for her – she's a monster, she's a sexual predator," Levine said. "She deserves to be doing time behind bars, and this is wrong, and I'm very fearful of what's going on behind the scenes between her and the Trump administration. It looks to me like she's leaning for a pardon by President Trump."

Trump insisted to Newsmax on Saturday that he's more than willing to release the Epstein files but he fears that unredacted evidence would hurt "innocent people," but host Erielle Reshef asked Levine to comment on the president's claim.

"Who are the innocent people they're trying to protect here?" Reshef said.

"Well, I mean, that's a big question," Levin replied. "What I don't like here is the fact that there's 300 gigabytes worth of data that the American public, and certainly the victims have a right to see, and he can snap his fingers and we can see that material. Instead, he's holding it back, and they're working behind the scenes with Ghislaine Maxwell – just smells wrong. I'm not very happy about it."

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