Ghislaine Maxwell Drops New Epstein Allegations—and They’re a Doozy

Longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell has revealed that more than two dozen men received cushy plea deals with the government.

In a habeas petition filed Tuesday aimed at preemptively ending her prison sentence, Maxwell alleged that 29 friends of the notorious sex trafficker had been “protected” by the Justice Department by way of “secret settlements.”

Those settlements went to “25 men” and four potential “co-conspirators,” reported The Daily Beast. The petition has prompted questions regarding the identities of the cloaked individuals—and why the DOJ would offer them protection.

Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 19 to force the executive branch to release the files in their entirety. The bill stipulated that the Justice Department had 30 days to comply, but that deadline has since disappeared in the rearview. It is now late January, and less than one percent of the files has been made publicly available.

In a Tuesday court filing, the DOJ offered vague placations that it expects to process the trove, which includes two million documents, “in the near term.” Officials did not provide a specific date for the full release, as required by law.

Employees at the Justice Department are reportedly manually reviewing the pages to find and redact the names of victims and, presumably, censor mentions of protected individuals.

So far, the DOJ has released roughly 12,285 documents related to the Epstein files, totalling 125,575 pages.

Earlier this month, Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie called for a special master or independent counsel to hold the DOJ to a timeline as it drags its feet on the cache.

“The Department of Justice is openly defying the law by refusing to release the full Epstein files,” Khanna said in a statement. “Millions of files are being kept from the public.”

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in jail for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. Maxwell’s attorneys have pressed the White House for a pardon for several months now, though the White House has not indicated it will grant one.

A July interview between Maxwell and the DOJ proved incredibly fruitful for the convict, however, sparking concerns that the Trump administration had offered Maxwell a quid pro quo in exchange for a revised “Epstein list.”

Shortly after she spoke with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Maxwell—one of the worst sex criminals of the century—received an extremely cushy transfer, shipping her from a Florida prison to a low-security prison camp in Texas where she has been granted many privileges not typically afforded to inmates. Her time behind bars has since included meal service in her cell, unlimited toilet paper, and access to private visitations in a chaplain’s office outside standard visiting hours. Her requests to be separated from other inmates have also been granted, with tables and cellmates reportedly being relocated at her whim.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has suddenly changed his story on Alex Pretti’s killing after Donald Trump’s inner circle began to turn on him.

In a statement Tuesday, Miller conceded that Customs and Border Protection agents “may not have been following protocol” when they shot and killed Pretti.

Miller claimed that the White House had “provided clear guidance to DHS that the extra personnel that had been sent to Minnesota for force protection should be used for conducting fugitive operations to create a physical barrier between the arrest teams and the disruptors.”

“We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol,” he added.

To be sure, Miller’s statement didn’t meet the level of an apology or even a revelation, considering that any person who actually watched a video of the shooting could tell that it’s not protocol to fire 10 rounds at a disarmed man who was pinned to the ground.

But it’s a long way from Miller’s initial baseless claim that Pretti was a “would-be assassin” who’d attempted to murder federal law enforcement officers.

Miller’s callous response to federal agents killing an American citizen in broad daylight has not impressed his fellow Republicans. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Senator Thom Tillis took Miller to task for attacking Pretti “before he had even talked with anybody on the ground.”

“Stephen Miller never fails to live up to my expectations of incompetence,” Tillis said, adding that if he were president, Miller would already be out of Washington.

Speaking to the press Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not defend Miller’s “assassin” comment, and the ghoulish policy adviser was notably absent from a two-hour meeting Monday between Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The president’s social media addiction may have just cost him another court case.

In a post on Truth Social Wednesday morning, Donald Trump openly attempted to sway Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey into fulfilling his immigration agenda, a blatant violation of the Tenth Amendment.

“Surprisingly, Mayor Jacob Frey just stated that, ‘Minneapolis does not, and will not, enforce Federal Immigration Laws,’” Trump wrote. “This is after having had a very good conversation with him. Could somebody in his inner sanctum please explain that this statement is a very serious violation of the Law, and that he is PLAYING WITH FIRE!”

The problem for Trump’s bloviating is twofold. Not only is Minnesota—or any state, for that matter—not required to enforce federal law under the “anti-commandeering doctrine” of the Tenth Amendment, but his insistence that the North Star State do so effectively spells out that he’s attempting to strong-arm Minnesota into changing its local policies.

Legal reporters noted that detail alone could prove disastrous for Trump’s side in Minnesota’s federal lawsuit, which requests a temporary restraining order to end Operation Metro Surge. Officials have described ICE’s presence as an “unprecedented surge of DHS agents into the state.”

“Trump could not have designed a better statement to convince Judge Menendez that Operation Metro Surge is meant to coerce policy changes,” posted Politico’s Kyle Cheney. “And the menacing ‘playing with fire’ is exactly the kind of statement (‘retribution is coming’) that worked against the administration in court earlier this week.”

The Supreme Court has ruled several times that states cannot be forced to enact federal policy and that the federal government cannot sway state policy, setting national precedent in rulings such as Printz v. United States (1997) and New York v. United States (1992).

In just a few short weeks, Operation Metro Surge has conducted militarized raids across Minnesota, terrorizing residents while carrying out what state officials have described as “dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional stops and arrests, all under the guise of lawful immigration enforcement.”

The federal presence has also claimed the lives of two U.S. citizens. In the last month, agents with ICE and Customs and Border Protection shot and killed two U.S. citizens: Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti and award-winning poet Renee Nicole Good.

In 2025, the agency killed 32 people—its deadliest year in more than two decades.

ICE may have provoked an international incident by attempting to enter the Ecuadorian Consulate in Minneapolis Tuesday.

At about 11 a.m., diplomatic staff had to block an ICE agent from entering the building, which is off limits to law enforcement without prior authorization from Ecuador under the Vienna Convention. Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry lodged a formal diplomatic complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Ecuador over the attempted entry “so that acts of this nature don’t happen again.”

In a video of the incident, consulate staff can be seen rushing to the building’s entrance after the agent opens the door. The staff informed him, “This is the Ecuadorean Consulate, you’re not allowed to enter.” In response, the ICE agent replied, “If you touch me, I’ll grab you.”

According to The New York Times, the Consulate building is clearly labeled with Ecuador’s national seal. In a statement, Ecuador’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “Consulate staff immediately prevented the ICE official from entering the consular building, thereby guaranteeing the protection of the Ecuadorians who found themselves in the consular building in that moment, and activating emergency protocols issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Human Movement.”

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, detained by ICE agents last week along with his father, was a native of Ecuador along with his father, and the pair were pursuing asylum claims in the U.S. ICE agents allegedly used the child as bait to detain his family members.

The Vienna Convention clearly states that a country’s embassies and consulates are considered sovereign territory of that country, and protected by diplomatic immunity from unauthorized entry from the host nation. Tuesday’s incident is just more proof that ICE agents have no regard for the law, and see no checks on their power and authority.

The woman who filmed federal agents shooting and killing Alex Pretti still hasn’t been contacted by the government days later, only fanning accusations of a federal cover-up.

“Have you been contacted by anyone from the federal government?” CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Minnesota resident Stella Carlson, whose footage has been crucial in delegitimizing the Trump administration’s lies about Pretti. “FBI?”

“No, no, I have not. I do have a legal team now who are fielding much of that, and I am no longer accessible in those ways,” Carlson replied.

“I talked to your attorney this morning; she said she had not received any outreach from the FBI or anybody from the federal government,” Cooper said.

“I do not think they have my name yet,” said Carlson, a shocking oversight given that it’s been four days since the shooting. She then expressed that she had zero confidence in a federal investigation into Pretti’s killing.

“I have faith in various representatives throughout our country who are trying to do the right thing.… I have faith in our local government in Minnesota,” Carlson said. “But [the federal government is] trying to block that from happening. They wouldn’t even let the investigative team come to the crime scene. Their goal is to protect themselves and to spin stories.”

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Speaking to an eyewitness of a killing seems to be a very basic requirement in an investigation, and yet the federal government seems to have gone out of its way not to do it. Carlson isn’t the only Minnesotan who’s been alarmed by the federal government’s sparse, shady investigative protocol here.

“Feels like a cover-up to me.… One thing’s certainly true: The state government has the right to criminally charge anyone, including a federal agent, who commits a crime in our state,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told Democracy Now! on Tuesday. “But what the federal authorities seem to be doing in the three cases of shootings here in Minnesota is to say, ‘Yeah, we kind of know that you have the right to prosecute us, so what we’re going to do is frustrate your capability of prosecuting us by grabbing evidence, by spiriting people away out of the state, by allowing our agents to wear masks so they’re never accountable.’ This is the sort of tactic that they’re using.”