President Donald Trump's Justice Department is behaving unusually and improperly with their sudden move to question convicted former Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, legal expert Lisa Rubin told MSNBC's "The Beat" on Tuesday evening.
"What are we to make of [Deputy Attorney General] Todd Blanche taking this move to try to meet with Maxwell in the coming days?" asked anchor Antonia Hylton.
"It's bizarre," said Rubin. "Because when he said in his tweet this morning announcing that he had made the offer, no administration has ever done something like that. That's because it would be highly, highly unusual. And it is for any political appointee to go visit a convicted felon, much less a felon ... indicted by Trump's Justice Department."
"These were investigations started on President Trump's watch during his first term," Rubin continued. "So the fact that Todd Blanche is saying now, no administration has ever done this, that's because it is untoward and bizarre for the political leadership of the Department of Justice to visit with any convicted felon in a case that they otherwise supported. And as recently as last week, this Department of Justice submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in which they defended the conviction and said that it needed to stand. That's a brief submitted by John Sauer, the solicitor general, who was also a former lawyer, in a personal capacity, to President Trump, just like Todd Blanche. So now, watching them sort of undercut that move seems really strange to me."
What makes this even more strange, she said, is "why are they not going back to the well of unsealed materials from civil litigations?"
"There are multiple civil cases that have been filed in which various people, including Maxwell and Epstein themselves, were deposed," Rubin continued. "Much of that material has been unsealed with appropriate redactions. If people want to know more about theoretical Johns, as you put it, lots of that information is public for the taking with anyone, for anyone with a computer or a phone and a PACER password, or the ability to find public court filings that's there."
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