Ghislaine Maxwell may be locked up in the Club Med version of a Texas prison, but she just lobbed a rhetorical grenade straight into the middle of Washington’s most awkward silence.
Buried in a habeas petition that Maxwell recently filed in court, hoping to void her conviction, the convicted associate of Jeffrey Epstein references four potential “co-conspirators” and “25 men” who allegedly reached “secret settlements” connected to Epstein’s abuse—and were never indicted.
Which immediately raises the question Pam Bondi and her Department of Justice desperately want to avoid answering: Who are these men, and why are they still being protected?
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act specifically to stop this kind of institutional stonewalling. The law signed by President Donald Trump in mid-November requires the Justice Department to release unclassified Epstein-related records. Clear. Simple. Mandatory. And yet the DOJ continues to slow-walk, redact, and delay its way around compliance like it’s trying to outlast public attention.
Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna—still the most unexpected duo in modern politics—have been openly furious. They’ve hit out at the DOJ for defying the law, demanded timelines, and warned that subpoenas are on the way.
But before anyone pretends Maxwell’s petition is all theoretical, we already know what “settlement, no indictment” looks like in real life. As The Swamp has previously reported, billionaire Leon Black, a Trump ally and former Apollo CEO, paid $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands to settle claims tied to his financial dealings with Epstein. No criminal charges, just a very large check and a quiet exit.
Notably, Black is the same person who, in 2018, as Congress probed foreign interference in the 2016 election, gave evidence about being with Trump during a trip to Russia in the naughty ‘90s, where they attended a concert, a discotheque, and, according to Black’s sworn testimony, “might have been in a strip club together.” Black paid Epstein roughly $170 million, nominally for “tax and estate planning” but denied knowing anything about his industrial-scale sex trafficking. But multiply that settlement by 25 and suddenly Maxwell’s filing looks less like noise and more like a roadmap.
So naturally, Trump’s response has been to deflect. Every time the Epstein story heats up, he magically discovers a new distraction: Venezuela, Greenland, the White House ballroom. If the DOJ had nothing to hide, transparency would be easy. If the files were harmless, they’d already be public.
If the names didn’t matter, nobody would be working this hard to keep them secret.
The Daily Beast is an American news website focused on politics, media, and pop culture. Founded in 2008, the website is owned by IAC Inc.
It has been characterized as a "high-end tabloid" by Noah Shachtman, the site's editor-in-chief from 2018 to 2021. In a 2015 interview, former editor-in-chief John Avlon described the Beast's editorial approach: "We seek out scoops, scandals, and stories about secret worlds; we love confronting bullies, bigots, and hypocrites."[4] In 2018, Avlon described the Beast's "strike zone" as "politics, pop culture, and power". (Wikipedia)
