A former Fox News host has warned that President Donald Trump will face a full-blown MAGA uprising if he pardons convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
“There will be an insurrection,” Gretchen Carlson said on MSNBC Saturday. Carlson left Fox News after helping to expose widespread sexual harassment at the network.
“If that happens, it won’t just be Democrats,” she continued. “It’ll be MAGA, it’ll be independents, it’ll be everybody. Because we are in a place in society right now where we know that child sex trafficking is a crime and that you should not be granted clemency or any release for doing that to young women.”
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Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to abuse minors. Trump has said he has the power to pardon Maxwell, but has not been asked to do so. The Justice Department (DOJ) met with Maxwell for nine hours in July, after which she was transferred to a lower-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas.
As a candidate, Trump promoted far-right conspiracies that Epstein and his co-conspirator Maxwell were members of a global pedophilic cabal and that Epstein’s death was orchestrated by the pair’s powerful accomplices as cover for their crimes. He promised to release all files related to the disgraced financier.
But in office, Trump has faced a backlash from his supporters after the Justice Department (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concluded in a July 6 memo that the late financier and convicted sex trafficker’s 2019 death in police custody was a suicide and that he kept no long-rumored “client list” of super-wealthy accomplices.
The intense backlash from Trump’s base to the DOJ and FBI’s June memo has now prompted renewed scrutiny of the president’s past relationship with Epstein, a man he once described as a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
With Trump increasingly desperate for some means of placating MAGA’s rage, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s former criminal defense attorney, sat down for a nine-hour discussion with Maxwell, who is currently appealing her conviction before the Supreme Court.
Maxwell was thereafter transferred to a low-security facility in Texas that has no cell blocks or guard towers but does offer a gym, yoga classes, and a “puppy program.” As a convicted sex offender, Maxwell is ineligible to participate in the puppy program.
As the Justice Department reportedly weighs releasing transcripts from that interview, during which Maxwell reportedly said she never witnessed Trump behave inappropriately, speculation is now mounting that Trump may be plotting to pardon the convicted sex offender.
“That is the bigger slap in the face to the survivors,” Carlson said Saturday. “Normalizing the fact that it doesn’t matter what she did, the idea that that would even be on the table for consideration, that is going to cross all party lines.”
