MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell is continuing to cast doubt on President Donald Trump’s claim that he wasn’t aware of sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell’s prison transfer, which reportedly required a special waiver.
“The only people who can believe that are the people who believe every word Donald Trump says,” O’Donnell said Tuesday on “The Last Word.”
Maxwell was serving her 20-year sentence at a federal prison in Florida, but amid public furor over the Trump administration withholding files on her late accomplice Jeffrey Epstein, she is seeking a deal — and was moved to a minimum-security facility in Texas last week.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche visited Maxwell in Florida last month after Trump infuriated his own base by dismissing calls for transparency on the Epstein case. Maxwell’s attorney David Markus said last week she would be “eager” to testify — in exchange for clemency.
Maxwell was transferred to the more lenient prison in Texas within days of this apparent offer.
When CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins asked Trump on Tuesday if he had personally approved the transfer or knew about it beforehand, the president said, “I didn’t know about it at all. Nope. I read about it just like you did,” adding that “it’s not a very uncommon thing.”
However, O’Donnell didn’t buy Trump’s denial. “The rules had to be changed” by Trump’s Justice Department to transfer Maxwell, the MSNBC host pointed out, echoing CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig.
“It’s almost impossible that Ghislaine Maxwell just happened, by coincidence, to be moved to a better facility a week or so after she met with Todd Blanche,” Honig told Collins Tuesday.
“You would need specific authorization, you would need a waiver because Maxwell is … a convicted child sex offender,” Honig said. “And the suggestion the president seemed to be making, that it just happens in the usual course of business, no, it does not.”
O’Donnell previously wagered that Trump might pardon Maxwell entirely if she testifies that he wasn’t involved in her or Epstein’s crimes. On Tuesday, he reiterated his belief that Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, visited her behind bars for precisely that reason.
“That was obviously the mission Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer embarked on — get Ghislaine Maxwell to say nothing that would be harmful to Donald Trump,” O’Donnell said Tuesday.
“And then Ghislaine Maxwell immediately got transferred from a serious federal prison in Florida meant to house, among others, sex criminals, to the easiest federal custody facility that exists in America for women, which is not meant to house sex criminals,” he added.
As O’Donnell noted on his show, perhaps most telling is that sources — who are familiar with what Maxwell told Blanche during their meeting — have already told ABC that she “said nothing during the interview that would be harmful to President Donald Trump.”
Watch O’Donnell’s full monologue below: