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Ghislaine Maxwell, who's serving a 20-year jail term for crimes which include child sex trafficking
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has been asked by the U.S. Justice Department to speak to prosecutors about what she knew of Jeffrey Epstein and his associates
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Now, you might think she had already spoken to prosecutors, which might be why she's serving 20 years in jail in the first place
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But I guess this just goes to show that this is a story which, with President Trump under pressure still from his own supporters to release more information, just will not
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go away. I began by asking John Sweeney, author of Hunting Ghislaine, to remind us of the background
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Yes, so she's the daughter of Robert Maxwell, who was a monster ogre figure who ruled the Daily Mirror
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group back in the 80s. He falls off his yacht in 91, almost certainly suicide in my view, and she
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leaves one monster in her life, her father, who was a horrible human being
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to everybody, including her. And she finds a second monster, Jeffrey Epstein
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And he is a paedophile. He's got a thing about 14, 15, 16-year-old girls
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And she facilitates, she produces these girls. Often they're poor, in American
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terms, trailer trash. And sets up a kind of industrial scale pimping
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So she's the pimp or the madam or both She the madam and she the pimp and because her father was a horrible man to her and may possibly have even sexually abused her certainly psychologically abused her she also something of a victim and that part of her tragedy
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But the story has now moved on because she was convicted and has got a 20-year sentence
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So she's in prison. Now, what Trump said when he wasn't in power, and the MAGA base loved this conspiracy story like there's no tomorrow, was that there was a whole bunch of other paedophiles who Epstein was protecting and he was blackmailing them
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And there is a list. And this list, they hope, includes lots of prominent Democrats and sort of liberal financiers and the people they hate in the first place
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Yes. Now, the problem with the story is that there is a kernel of truth in that Epstein was a very rich paedophile and he was a Democrat
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But that's pretty much where it ends. The evidence that the feds got pointed at Ghislaine Maxwell and a very small circle around her, but she was the prime pimp
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But in terms of other powerful men, there wasn't any evidence that they were talking about
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Including, we should say, Donald Trump himself, who was clearly a friend of Epstein for a while. He's, you know, filmed with him laughing and joking
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For a long long time But it worse than that Andrew He wasn just a friend He was somebody who said that there was an interview with New York Magazine not New Yorker in 2002
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which Trump said, so Jeffrey, he likes beautiful women just as much as I do
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And sometimes a little on the younger side. He said that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, in 2002. So that points to it
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2003, it's just come out. it's Epstein's 50th birthday and Trump sends a kind of saucy
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drawing in the form of a naked woman. We should say he completely
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denies this. He says I don't even do drawings and this is not my words
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And he's suing Wall Street Journal for $10 billion. And somebody called Rupert Murdoch
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And by the way, yes I know you've been I've been out of the country and suddenly
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you're hitting me with a Scottish irony and I'm... Well done, yeah
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But he's... And that's a fascinating court case because there's lots of evidence
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that Trump does do drawings and the source of that, by the way
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could well have been Ghislaine Maxwell because it was she who compared the book
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By the way... We've been enjoying ourselves so much we haven't told people what the message said
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It was... It was... Gosh, it was so revolting. I've switched my mind off it
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but it was a drawing of a girl. It was a drawing of a naked woman
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and it was wishing Jeffrey Epstein happy birthday So and that happened in 2003 2004 they fall out The big point here is that yes
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Trump did hang out with the Epsteins for a very long time
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from about 92 till 2003, so more than a decade, 13 years, something like this
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But they fall out. But there's no evidence at all, and Clinton was another big pal
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that they actually were interested in having sex with 13, 14, 15-year-olds
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And the problem Donald Trump has is his base look at all of this
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and they wonder why all this evidence, which we think may not exist, by the way
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these long lists, may not be there, but they don't believe that. And they wonder why he's not letting it out
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which is, again, perhaps why they're going back to Ghislaine Maxwell and saying
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can we talk to you? Yes, there's another complexity or another detail here
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that Maureen Comey, who was the prosecutor, and she was very, very good
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and her witnesses that she produced in court were very good, and the jury convicted Ghislaine Maxwell
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she resigned the other day. And it's possible the reason why she resigned
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was because what the Trump people want to hear is there's more dirt, serious dirt to come
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And I don't think so. I think that Epstein was an evil man, but he was clever
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and I do not think there is a list of black male victims
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I don't think he worked like that. No smoking guns, John. Thank you very much indeed
