Washington — Todd Blanche, the second highest-ranking Justice Department official, met with Ghislaine Maxwell at the U.S. attorney’s office in Tallahassee on Thursday to discuss convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

David Oscar Markus, Maxwell’s lawyer, declined to comment “on the substance” of the meeting, but told reporters outside the office that “there were a lot of questions and we went all day.”

“And she answered every one of them. She never did say, ‘I’m not going to answer,’ never declined,” he said. “This is the first time that the government has asked questions, so we were thankful that the deputy attorney general came and asked her questions. It’s the first time the government did it. So it was a good day.”

In a post Thursday night on X, Blanche wrote that he met with Maxwell and “will continue my interview of her tomorrow. The Department of Justice will share additional information about what we learned at the appropriate time.”

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence at a low-security federal correctional institute in Tallahassee. She was convicted in 2021 for her role in helping Epstein recruit, groom and abuse underage girls.

Blanche’s meeting comes after he said earlier this week that he planned to meet with Maxwell “in the coming days.”

“Justice demands courage. For the first time, the Department of Justice is reaching out to Ghislaine Maxwell to ask: what do you know?” Blanche wrote on social media Tuesday. He said he contacted Maxwell’s lawyers at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi. “I intend to meet with her soon. No one is above the law — and no lead is off-limits,” Blanche wrote. Markus then confirmed that Maxwell’s legal team was in discussions with the government.

Pressure has been building on President Trump and his administration over Epstein’s case after the Justice Department and FBI released a memo earlier this month that concluded Epstein did not have a “client list” and confirmed he died by suicide in 2019, shortly after he was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges.

The memo also concluded that there was no “credible evidence” that the disgraced financier blackmailed prominent people. The Justice Department and FBI said they would not release any further information about Epstein’s case.

But the Trump administration’s conclusions rankled some of his allies, who were skeptical of the Justice Department’s claim that there is nothing left to divulge.

Some of the administration’s top officials, including Vice President JD Vance and FBI Director Kash Patel, had suggested before Mr. Trump returned to the White House that Democrats were hiding information about Epstein and his alleged list of clients.

In an effort to quell the backlash, the Justice Department asked federal judges in New York who handled Epstein and Maxwell’s cases to unseal transcripts from grand jury proceedings involving the two.

Earlier this week, judges overseeing the requests each ordered the Justice Department to submit additional filings to the court about its efforts to unseal the grand jury records. The judges gave the defendants — in Epstein’s case, his representative — and victims until Aug. 5 to lay out their positions on the proposed disclosure.

It will be up to the judges to decide whether the grand jury material can be disclosed. If they grant the requests, the information will likely be heavily redacted, and it is likely to be weeks or months before the transcripts are unsealed.

In addition to facing backlash from some of his allies, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have pushed to make material related to Epstein public.

A House panel voted Wednesday to subpoena the Justice Department for files related to the federal probe into Epstein. The House Oversight Committee also subpoenaed Maxwell to sit for a deposition next month at the federal detention center in Tallahassee.

Mr. Trump has acknowledged he and Epstein moved in the same social circles in Florida and New York from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. But the president said in 2019, following Epstein’s arrest, that they hadn’t spoken in 15 years.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Mr. Trump signed a “bawdy” letter to Epstein for his 50th birthday that said, in part, “may every day be another wonderful secret.” CBS News has not independently seen or verified the letter. The president has denied that he wrote the letter, calling it “fake,” and sued the Journal and its owners for defamation. He is seeking at least $20 billion in damages.

The Journal reported Wednesday that when Justice Department officials reviewed documents related to Epstein earlier this year, they learned Mr. Trump’s name appeared multiple times. Bondi and her deputy told the president at a White House meeting in May that his name was in the so-called Epstein files, as were those of other public figures, according to the Journal. Mr. Trump being mentioned does not mean he committed any wrongdoing.

White House communications director Steven Cheung said in response to the Journal’s report that “The fact is that The President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media, just like the Obama Russiagate scandal, which President Trump was right about.”

contributed to this report.

A top US Justice Department official spent hours on Thursday grilling Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned accomplice of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as President Donald Trump struggles to tamp down a furor over his handling of the explosive case.

David Markus, Maxwell’s attorney, said the former British socialite answered every question she was asked during a day-long meeting at a courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida.

“She never invoked a privilege. She never declined to answer,” Markus told reporters. “She answered all the questions truthfully, honestly, and to the best of her ability.”

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Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said he would continue interviewing Maxwell on Friday and “share additional information about what we learned at the appropriate time.”

Markus said he was not going to comment on the “substance” of the meeting with Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer for his hush money trial and two federal criminal cases.

Maxwell, 63, is serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted in 2021 of recruiting underage girls for Epstein, who died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial in his own sex trafficking case.

Earlier this week, Blanche said if Maxwell has “information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.

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“No one is above the law — and no lead is off-limits,” he said.

Trump, 79, was once a close friend of Epstein and The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the president’s name was among hundreds found during a DOJ review of the so-called “Epstein files,” though there has not been evidence of wrongdoing.

Trump filed a $10 billion defamation suit against the Journal last week after it reported that he had penned a sexually suggestive letter to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003.

Maxwell is the only former Epstein associate convicted in connection with his activities, which right-wing conspiracy theorists allege included trafficking young models for VIPs.

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The meeting with Maxwell marks another attempt by the Trump administration to defuse anger among the Republican president’s supporters over what they have long seen as a cover-up of sex crimes by Epstein, who was a wealthy financier with high-level connections.

– ‘Corrupt deal’ –

Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said the meeting between Maxwell and a Justice Department official who used to be Trump’s own lawyer smacks of a “corrupt deal so that she can exonerate Donald Trump.”

Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said it raises a number of troubling questions.

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“Is he really going as (deputy attorney general) or is he going de facto as Trump’s personal criminal attorney, Tom Hagen style?” the senator said in a reference to the Corleone family lawyer in “The Godfather.”

“Will he promise her a pardon for silence, or for a Trump-friendly tale?” Whitehouse asked.

Many of the president’s core supporters want more transparency on the Epstein case, and Trump had promised to deliver that on retaking the White House in January.

But he has since dismissed the controversy as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” and the DOJ and FBI released a memo this month claiming the Epstein files did not contain evidence that would justify further investigation.

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Epstein committed suicide while in jail and was not murdered, did not blackmail any prominent figures, and did not keep a “client list,” according to the July 7 FBI-DOJ memo.

Seeking to redirect public attention, the White House has promoted unfounded claims in recent days that former president Barack Obama led a “years-long coup” against Trump around his victorious 2016 election.

The extraordinary narrative claims that Obama had ordered intelligence assessments to be manipulated to accuse Russia of election interference to help Trump.

Yet it runs counter to four separate probes between 2019 and 2023 — each of them concluding that Russia did interfere and did, in various ways, help Trump.

Epstein was found hanging dead in his New York prison cell while awaiting trial on charges that he sexually exploited hundreds of victims at his homes in New York and Florida.

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It remained unclear what information Ms. Maxwell, who has made it plain she wants out of prison, could provide beyond what is already in the public record.

The interview is part of the department’s effort to quell criticism that federal officials are concealing details about Mr. Epstein’s crimes and interactions with high-profile figures, including President Trump. A report in The Wall Street Journal, which described a bawdy birthday poem signed by Mr. Trump as part of a book that Ms. Maxwell put together for Mr. Epstein’s 50th birthday, has further fueled the firestorm.

The involvement of Mr. Blanche, a former criminal lawyer for Mr. Trump, in contacting Ms. Maxwell is an extraordinary effort by an administration official to address a presidential political crisis. It has little, if any, law enforcement implication, and is one of several harried and hurried actions in recent days intended to distract from the furor over the administration’s decision to not release more files in the Epstein case. The case is an obsession of many far-right influencers at the core of Mr. Trump’s base, and officials now in the administration had suggested during the campaign that they would release the files.

On Wednesday, a House Oversight subcommittee voted to subpoena the department for all of the remaining documents that have not been released, a rebuke of the decision this month by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, to reverse course and not release documents and video, citing concerns for victims and witnesses.

All of these efforts by the White House and the Justice Department appear to be stoking even more interest in the case. Increasingly, critics are focusing on Mr. Trump’s friendship with Mr. Epstein, which ended in rancor two decades ago.

Sen. Kevin Cramer speaks with CNN’s Manu Raju on Thursday. CNN

Some Republican lawmakers signaled today that they would prefer the Trump administration put out more information about the Jeffrey Epstein case, as the party and President Donald Trump face persistent public pressure.

Here’s what some GOP senators said today on the matter:

Sen. Kevin Cramer, the conservative from North Dakota, suggested the White House facilitate the release of Epstein documents to avoid the appearance of impropriety, given that Trump’s name is reportedly in them. “The appearance is that if, if the same administration is blocking the information that isn’t you know implicated in it, that it can look bad … sometimes you do the right thing, even if it makes you look bad in the short run,” Cramer said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committe, called on the administration to “release all the Epstein stuff.” “I want to protect victims but be as transparent as you can with Epstein,” he said.

Sen. John Cornyn took a different tack, saying he would defer to the Justice Department on how to handle the situation. “I think there’s a file sitting on Pam Bondi’s desk, which is an investigation,” Cornyn said, when asked why he’s not directly calling for an Epstein investigation.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin, who introduced a non-binding resolution which would require the courts to release documents related to Epstein, defended Trump’s handling of the matter. “The president has been very transparent on this, and I’m not concerned about that at all,” Mullin told reporters, when asked if he was concerned about any possible exposure for Trump if the files were released.

Sen. Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, was blunt on if his committee will investigate the Epstein situation: “No,” he said.

Trump formally endorsed Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina tonight.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said last month that he would not seek re-election. Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump said earlier today that she would not make a bid to replace him.

“Mike would make an unbelievable Senator from North Carolina. He is fantastic at everything he does,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“He is STRONG on the Border, stopping Crime, supporting our Military/Veterans, cutting Taxes, and saving our always under siege Second Amendment. I need him in Washington, and I need him representing YOU! ”

NBC News previously reported that Whatley planned to run for the seat and that Trump told him that he would support his bid, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Lara Trump, who was considered a prime contender, said earlier today that she would not run.