“Your Honor, the Government calls to the stand as its next witness… Ghislaine Maxwell.”

Can you see it? As a federal prosecutor with the Southern District of New York, I worked with all manner of frightful cooperating witnesses – fraudsters, gangsters, killers – and I sure can’t. 

The Justice Department and defense lawyers for Maxwell engaged publicly this week around the convicted child sex trafficker’s potential cooperation. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that he has reached out to Maxwell’s legal team and that, if “Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.”

Maxwell’s lead defense attorney, David Markus, confirmed publicly “that we are in discussions with the government and that Ghislaine will always testify truthfully.” And Blanche reportedly met with Maxwell and her team on Thursday. 

It’s a start. But count me skeptical about the prospects for long-term success. Sure, the parties have broached potential cooperation, and may hold substantive meetings soon. But the possibility of Maxwell ultimately becoming a proper, viable cooperating witness for the Justice Department remains remote.

Cooperation is (definitionally) a two-way affair. But here, both sides face, and present, substantial obstacles. 

First and most fundamentally, Maxwell herself must be willing to come clean about everyone she’s ever known and everything she’s ever known. That’s how federal cooperation works, especially in the SDNY; there’s no such thing as partial cooperation. Prosecutors will not accept selective implication of other wrongdoers, or shaded versions of the truth. So Maxwell would need not only to cross the threshold of the prosecutor’s office, but also to tell all once she starts talking.  

Yet throughout her criminal career to this point – including the duration of her federal prosecution over the past five years, when she would have been in an optimal position to help herself by talking to the feds – she has held tight and remained mum. She’s gone decades in immediate proximity to power and grotesque criminality, yet she’s never said a word. 

And when Maxwell has testified under oath in civil depositions, she has lied. When asked in a 2016 deposition whether “Jeffrey Epstein [had] a scheme to recruit underage girls for sexual massages,” she responded, under oath, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She swore that “I wasn’t aware that he was having sexual activities with anyone when I was with him other than myself.” Why should anyone believe her now? 

Perhaps Maxwell has had a change of heart now that she’s been convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison, with her appeals just about exhausted. (She has a pending petition to the Supreme Court, which is unlikely to take the case). But Maxwell’s primary appeal was rejected nearly a year ago, and she didn’t make any move towards the government then, or in the immediate aftermath. It is possible, if somewhat unusual, for a federal defendant to cooperate successfully after trial and sentencing. But it’s substantially more difficult for a defendant to turn into a cooperating witness so late in the process and so long after the fact, and it’s tougher for prosecutors to make productive use of dated information. 

And Maxwell is only half the equation – the less problematic half, in fact. We also must consider Maxwell from DOJ’s perspective. 

The Justice Department plainly has a renewed sense of motivation given the recent firestorm around its handling of the Epstein files. Recall that, just two weeks ago, DOJ issued a memo saying that the case should be closed with no further public disclosures, investigation, or criminal charges. But political winds change quickly, and Trump’s Justice Department has shown itself to be nothing if not a weather vane serving the President’s needs of the moment. 

But the notion of enlisting Maxwell as a cooperator remains far-fetched. I’m no delicate flower when it comes to cooperators; I flipped plenty of horrible people, and I understand firsthand that cooperation is the lifeblood of federal prosecution. But the notion of indicting and trying a case based on Maxwell’s testimony would give me nightsweats. 

Whenever DOJ calls a cooperating witness to the stand, prosecutors own him or her, for better or worse. Maxwell would become a government witness, embraced by and part of Team USA. Prosecutors must believe in and vouch for her credibility, and for their own decision to cut her a substantial sentencing break on her conviction for mass, systemic sexual abuse of children. 

How would that play with a jury? (Not to mention the public.) Maxwell is a convicted child sex trafficker; juries usually don’t love that. As the Justice Department itself put it after her 2021 conviction, Maxwell committed “one of the worst crimes imaginable – facilitating and participating in the sexual abuse of children.” I’ve put killers on the stand; juries usually understand and accept them as witnesses, in the end. But facilitators of mass child molestation – that’s different. 

Beyond the optics, DOJ prosecutors won’t enlist Maxwell as a cooperator unless and until they are convinced that she is being fully truthful about everyone and everything she’s ever known or done. If prosecutors suspect she might be holding anything back, against anyone, then the deal’s off. Jeffrey Epstein is the easy part; he’s gone. But Maxwell has spent a lifetime facilitating and protecting the abuse of children by licentious men. Will she suddenly turn on them now? All of them? 

Even if Maxwell comes fully clean, DOJ must then conclude it can bring viable criminal indictments against others based on her information. Among other obstacles, much of Maxwell’s information likely relates to decades-old conduct. Old crimes are more difficult to corroborate, of course, and Epstein and Maxwell’s operation was in its heyday over a quarter century ago. And much of the conduct about which Maxwell might testify could fall outside the statute of limitations – typically five years in the federal system (though federal law does allow longer limitations periods, or none at all, for sex offenses against minors). 

So what’s the play here by DOJ? On a practical level, it can never hurt to get a download of information from a potential cooperator – though one might reasonably ask why the Justice Department has had such a sudden turnabout from just a few weeks ago, when it concluded everything was over and should be closed down. On another level, if the Justice Department meets with Maxwell and her cooperation doesn’t ultimately work out – and I suspect it won’t – then the administration can try to appease critics who claim prosecutors were disinterested in expanding the investigation: Hey, we tried. And, to take a cynical view (perhaps justifiably), DOJ might eventually engage in selective leaking of any aspects of Maxwell’s statement that paint Trump in an innocuous light. 

The chances of Maxwell fully and successfully cooperating with the Justice Department have risen from zero-point-zero to, well, something higher than that. But the prospect of Ghislaine Maxwell – Epstein enabler and lieutenant, convict, sex trafficker, documented liar – becoming the redeeming savior in this whole mess is precisely as unlikely as it sounds.