Toying more freely with his pardon powers in an untethered second term, he told reporters outside the White House in July, “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.”
On Monday, speaking in the Oval Office hours after the Supreme Court news broke, the answer evolved again. “I haven’t heard the name in so long,” Trump said. “I can say this, that I’d have to take a look at it.”
“I will speak to the DOJ,” he added, noting that he has “a lot of people who have asked me for pardons,” including Diddy.
Days after Justice Department lawyers asked the Supreme Court to reject Markus’s petition in July, the agency held an unusual interview with Maxwell. She and Markus met with Todd Blanche, the department’s number two official and Trump’s lead lawyer in his New York hush money trial last year, in a Florida courthouse for two days. About a week later, she was moved to a lower-security Texas prison. When the interview tapes were released in August, they revealed the most extensive record to date of Maxwell’s speaking voice; her insistence, immediately broadcast across MAGA-friendly social media accounts, that she had never seen Trump do anything wrong; and perhaps not much else.
“I wish I could respond to those critics,” Markus told me in August when I raised to him the prevailing concerns about a quid pro quo. “But we’re just not going to comment on that.”
For the large and vocal community of Maxwell-watchers across social media, the intrigue surrounding a potential pardon continues to percolate. Lady Victoria Hervey, a Mar-a-Lago regular and former girlfriend of Prince Andrew who knew Maxwell from the ’90s London party scene, told me in July that “the only way to really deal with this situation” is to allow Maxwell to “have her voice.” I asked her on Monday if she still thought, as she had mentioned a few times, that a pardon was in the works.
“I think it’s highly possible,” Hervey said.
