Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein, urged the Supreme Court on Monday to overturn her sex trafficking conviction as her attorney simultaneously made overtures to President Trump.
“We are appealing not only to the Supreme Court but to the President himself to recognize how profoundly unjust it is to scapegoat Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein’s crimes, especially when the government promised she would not be prosecuted,” attorney David Oscar Markus said in a statement.
With pressure growing on the administration to release more information from the Epstein files, Trump has punted on whether he would pardon Maxwell. Trump said on Monday that “I’m allowed to give her” a pardon but “nobody’s approached me.”
Markus’s latest comments mark his most direct suggestion yet of Trump intervening. On Friday, Markus said he hadn’t spoken to the president yet about a pardon and “we’re going to take one day at a time.”
The new statement came as Maxwell on Monday made her final plea to the Supreme Court before the justices decide whether to take up her case. Maxwell filed the appeal in April, and the justices are poised to consider it upon returning from their summer recess.
Maxwell argues her conviction violates a non-prosecution agreement that Epstein signed with federal prosecutors. The appeal turns on the scope of the 2007 deal, which let Epstein avoid federal charges for pleading guilty to state-level sex crimes in Florida and serving 18 months in prison.
The deal was signed by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. Lower courts ruled the deal only covers that district and doesn’t apply to federal prosecutors in New York, where Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for aiding Epstein in abusing underage girls.
“Rather than grapple with the core principles of plea agreements, the government tries to distract by reciting a lurid and irrelevant account of Jeffrey Epstein’s misconduct,” Markus wrote in the new brief.
“But this case is about what the government promised, not what Epstein did.”
Last week, Maxwell sat for a two-day interview with the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Todd Blanche.
The Justice Department has opposed Maxwell’s Supreme Court appeal, rejecting the notion that the non-prosecution agreement spans any judicial district in the country.
“That contention is incorrect, and petitioner does not show that it would succeed in any court of appeals,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in court filings. “This case would also be an unsuitable vehicle for addressing the matters raised.”
