Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia have called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to grant them access to a minimum-security prison camp where Ghislaine Maxwell is being held.
In a letter sent on Thursday, obtained by The New York Times, the top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees said that more than a dozen whistleblowers had come forward with what they described as “damning information” about Maxwell’s treatment.
According to Raskin and Garcia, Maxwell, the longtime co-conspirator of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has been coddled and given “preferential” and “selective five-star” treatment at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas.
Maxwell, 64, is serving a 20-year prison sentence following her conviction by a federal jury for assisting Epstein in recruiting and trafficking underage girls for sexual abuse. The disgraced financier died in prison while awaiting trial in 2019.
The whistleblowers reportedly claimed that Maxwell has been allowed unsupervised access to a laptop, which the lawmakers described as “a remarkable security risk under the facility’s own rules and procedures.”
“While other inmates watch TV communally and drink tap water, Ms. Maxwell has been granted access to staff-only areas to watch CNN by herself, and she has been provided with bottled water with her meals,” the Democrats alleged.
When Maxwell requested the use of a gym machine that had been out of order for months during one of her private exercise sessions, “a panic-stricken staff member roused an inmate to fix it,” they said.
They also claimed that the prison warden sends out Maxwell’s mail under their own name, “presumably so it will not be searched as with other inmates.”
The Democrats suggested that Maxwell’s treatment may have been authorized at the highest levels of government. Trump and Epstein were once friendly, but the president said they fell out in 2004.
“While Ms. Maxwell’s special treatment is both astonishing and unprecedented, it clearly stems from the very top,” Raskin and Garcia wrote.
Maxwell was relocated from a low-security facility in Tallahassee, Florida, to the minimum-security Texas facility roughly a week after being interviewed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. The transfer appeared to contradict Bureau of Prisons rules, which generally require inmates classified as sex offenders to be housed in low-security institutions rather than minimum-security ones.
At the time, Blanche defended the transfer as necessary to protect Maxwell’s safety. However, Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, claimed the president was “ticked” and “mighty unhappy” by the decision, adding that neither she nor Trump had been informed of the rationale behind the move.
“Ms. Wiles clearly did not look far for answers: she was unable or unwilling to explain which senior Trump Administration official ordered the transfer and the subsequent preferential treatment, or why President Trump has not simply transferred Ms. Maxwell back to a different facility, thereby ending this seemingly ceaseless stream of perks,” the Democrats argued.
They also said that a congressional delegation would visit the prison camp in February to investigate the allegations.
Trump administration officials “have apparently attempted to prevent the truth from seeing the light of day by retaliating against inmates and staff at FPC Bryan,” they wrote.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Department of Justice for comment.
Maxwell is scheduled to be deposed in closed session by the House Oversight Committee on Feb. 9.
