Attorney General Pam Bondi will appear Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee, where she will no doubt be grilled about her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, but a legal analyst pinpointed one specific question she must answer about that matter.
Bondi is overseeing the delayed release of investigative files to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed last fall by Congress, but MS NOW legal analyst Jordan Rubin said he's most interested in a decision she made months before.
"Why was Todd Blanche the one to conduct a proffer of Ghislaine Maxwell?" Rubin wrote.
The deputy attorney general – a former defense lawyer for President Donald Trump – said Bondi directed him to visit the convicted Epstein co-conspirator in prison to interview her, but Rubin is puzzled why the attorney general would have selected the second highest-ranking Justice Department official for that task.
"On top of Blanche’s enduring allegiance to Trump and the clear conflict it creates, he was an odd choice to question Maxwell about any actionable Epstein-related information she might have — that is, if the point was to properly collect and analyze such information," Rubin wrote.
Proffer sessions are typically conducted by prosecutors who've actually worked on the case at hand, so they would know which questions to ask and how to assess the value of the defendant's answers, but that's not the case with Blanche, who Rubin said was "doomed to fail."
"Unsurprisingly, the published transcripts and audio of Blanche’s conversations with Maxwell showed that at least one of his priorities — perhaps his sole priority — was to try to exonerate Trump," Rubin wrote. "Indeed, there seemed to be an unspoken understanding of that purpose between Blanche and Maxwell."
The convicted child sex trafficker told Blanche that she never saw Trump in any "inappropriate setting" and insisted he was always "a gentleman in all respects" in her experience, and shortly after the proffer session she was transferred without explanation to a minimum-security facility, and her attorney has said Maxwell would testify if granted clemency by the president.
"The truth does matter," Rubin wrote. "That’s why Blanche was the wrong one to purportedly seek it in this situation."
"And that’s what makes the question of why Bondi sent him to do so a challenging one for her to answer honestly," the legal analyst added. "She either tasked Blanche with a political mission to please their boss at the expense of doing the job of a prosecutor, or she didn’t understand the job of a prosecutor. Either answer would reflect that she’s in the wrong job herself."
