DOJ 'started another firestorm' with release of Maxwell's suggestion about Epstein suicide

President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to move past the Jeffrey Epstein scandal in releasing interview transcripts of Epstein-associate Ghislaine Maxwell will likely only fan the flames of the controversy, one journalist argued Saturday morning on CNN.

“If anything, they've sort of started another firestorm,” said Errol Louis, journalist and host of “The Big Deal with Errol Louis” on Spectrum News, speaking with CNN Saturday.

“Here you have Ghislaine Maxwell saying she doesn't think that (Epstein) died by suicide, she thinks that he was murdered, and that it could have been done for as little as $25. So now everyone will go back to all of the swirling controversy around what happened to the missing video tape, who was in charge of the night in question, and what happened to the guards.”

Trump’s Justice Department released both audio and transcripts Friday of its interview with Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence on sex-trafficking charges related to Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, and is alleged to have maintained a ‘client list’ of powerful figures for blackmail purposes.

The release represents Trump’s latest attempt to move past his own past connections with Epstein, connections that have created a firestorm for the president within his own supporters. Louis, however, argued that not only would the release of Maxwell’s interview only add fuel to the fire, but that any revelations from Maxwell were largely worthless given the circumstances surrounding the interview’s release.

“The problem of course here is that she was clearly assigned one thing and one thing only, which was to exonerate President Trump, and all of the circumstances around it lead right to that; from the leading questions by Todd Blanche, to the mere fact of the situation, that she was moved into a lower security confinement, and that President Trump of course has the power the to pardon her,” Louis said.

“So it's clear what game she is playing, but now we still don't have the answers that the conspiracy theorists always said that they wanted to have answered. It's going to continue. President Trump is getting what he wants, which is to have his name a little bit disconnected from it, but the controversy will continue.”

The Trump administration’s handling of Epstein has drawn scrutiny across the political spectrum, and particularly with his own supporters. The DOJ’s release of what it claimed was “raw” footage outside of Epstein’s cell in a New York prison only backfired after forensic experts determined the video had been altered, and that it included a “missing minute.”

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