Vice President JD Vance suggested that Tucker Carlson interview Ghislaine Maxwell about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal in a bid to clear President Donald Trump’s name, according to an excerpt from an upcoming book that ran in the New York Times Magazine.
Times correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan make the claim in Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, scheduled for publication by Simon & Schuster on June 23. The press calls the book “a landmark real-time history of a modern presidency like no other.”
Disgraced financier Epstein, who was friends with Trump and many other elite figures, was convicted in 2008 after pleading guilty to charges of procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute. He was arrested in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking and died in prison later that year; his death was ruled a suicide.
A bipartisan movement demanding that the Department of Justice release files from its Epstein investigation boiled over last year, resulting in millions—though not all—of the documents being made public, albeit with many redactions.
In their book, Haberman and Swan report that Vance wanted the files released quickly and suggested that Carlson, then a Trump ally, be dispatched to interview Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime friend, in prison, where she is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and conspiracy. “It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein,” the authors write of Vance’s reasoning.
Vance also floated the idea that he should appear on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast because “only a part of the conversation would be about Epstein. The rest of the interview, he told the group, could be about the president’s recently passed legislation and what it would do for working families.”
Neither the interview with Maxwell nor the podcast appearance with Rogan came to pass, and millions of the Epstein files remain unreleased.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
