US Justice Department issues transcripts of interviews with Ghislaine Maxwell

Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000 (Chris Ison/PA)

The US Justice Department has released transcripts of interviews its number two official did with Jeffrey Epstein’s imprisoned former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.

It comes as the Trump administration scrambles to present itself as transparent amid a fierce backlash over an earlier refusal to disclose a trove of records from the sex trafficking case.

The disclosure represents the latest Trump administration effort to repair self-inflicted political wounds after failing to deliver on expectations that its own officials had created through conspiracy theories and bold pronouncements that never came to pass.

I may have met Donald Trump at that time, because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much

By making public two days worth of interviews, officials appear to be hoping to at least temporarily keep at bay sustained anger from President Donald Trump’s base even as they continue to sit on other evidence they had suggested was being prepared for public release.

Maxwell recalled knowing about Mr Trump and possibly meeting him for the first time in 1990, when her newspaper magnate father, Robert Maxwell, was the owner of the New York Daily News.

“I may have met Donald Trump at that time, because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript.

Maxwell said her father was fond of Mr Trump’s then-wife, Ivana, “because she was also from Czechoslovakia, where my dad was from”.