Ghislaine Maxwell has one last shot at legal relief from her criminal conviction, but it’s a long one. For that reason, she might be angling to negotiate a deal with Donald Trump. But we should all be aware of the red flags that are now flying high.

The Supreme Court will consider Maxwell’s request to review her conviction for sex trafficking when the justices return from their summer hiatus on September 29. That’s the day of the Court’s annual “long conference,” when they review the petitions that have been rolling in all summer and decide which cases to hear. It takes four votes to put a case on the Court’s docket for the term that begins on the first Monday in October. It is hard to imagine four justices will find her case has legal merit, but the date could serve as a deadline of sorts for Trump to get out from under the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. 

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison for her role in the scheme, which included recruiting, grooming, and sexually abusing multiple teenage girls, some as young as 14. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial in jail. In her petition before the Supreme Court, Maxwell argues that her conviction was obtained in breach of a 2007 non-prosecution agreement. In that deal, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida agreed not to prosecute “any potential co-conspirator” of Epstein. 

Maxwell’s argument should be a non-starter, and I fully expect the Court to decline even to hear her case. Under a Supreme Court precedent called Santobello, prosecutors are bound by contract law to honor their promises, but the promises in this case were made by two non-parties to the prosecution. The language of the document itself says, in multiple places, that the agreement is between Epstein and the “United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida,” led at the time by Alex Acosta, who later served as Trump’s Secretary of Labor. As the Second Circuit Court of Appeals noted, a “plea agreement binds only the office of the United States Attorney for the district in which the plea is entered unless it affirmatively appears that the agreement contemplates a broader restriction.” In this case, the court found, nothing “in the text of the NPA or its negotiation history suggests that the NPA precluded USAO-SDNY from prosecuting Maxwell.” 

That rule has been DOJ practice for as long as I can remember, and one that makes eminent sense. Imagine the alternative – a prosecutor in Arizona could enter into a plea agreement with a low-level drug courier and bind forevermore any other federal jurisdiction from charging the kingpin of a transnational cartel operating in another part of the country. It seems highly unlikely to me that the Supreme Court will reverse its prior decision in Santobello or even hear the case. 

But recent events may give the Trump Administration an incentive to help her find a way out before the Court makes that decision at the end of September. A political firestorm has been raging around Attorney General Pam Bondi’s decision not to release the entire file, as she once pledged to do, and the Wall Street Journal has reported that Bondi told President Donald Trump that his name appears in the file multiple times. Trump’s own supporters have cried foul over Bondi’s about-face on releasing the file, after she herself raised public expectations. 

Adding to the suspicion, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Department’s number two official and Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, travelled to Florida last week to meet with Maxwell for two days at the prison where she is housed. Typically, criminal defendants are questioned in an effort to obtain information that will substantially assist the government in the prosecution of others. Did Blanche ask Maxwell whether she could implicate others in the sex trafficking scandal? It seems like the time to pursue those questions would have come and gone before her trial. Did Blanche instead ask whether she has the ability to “exonerate” Trump?  That could be something that would not have earned Maxwell leniency in her criminal case, but that now has value to Trump politically. A week later, Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas, perhaps a simple coincidence, but a curious development, considering that the Bureau of Prisons falls under Blanche’s remit. To me, it smacked of the appearance of a reward for her meeting with Blanche. 

While it seems politically untenable for Trump to pardon Maxwell or commute her sentence in light of her heinous crimes against children, one path to obtaining her cooperation would be to throw Acosta under the bus, blaming him for entering into the non-prosecution agreement, and falsely claiming that DOJ’s hands are now legally tied. After all, they would say, a deal is a deal. It would be only too convenient for the government to fold in its appeal, falsely claiming that it had no choice but to honor the agreement, entered into by a blundering Acosta. Maxwell gets her release, clears Trump, and Acosta takes the fall.

Let’s put this marker down now — if those events come to pass, they should be eyed with great skepticism.