Vice President JD Vance urged the White House to arrange a Tucker Carlson interview with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell inside federal prison, a move he believed would help clear President Donald Trump's name amid mounting pressure over the release of Jeffrey Epstein files, according to a new book by two New York Times reporters.
The proposal came during a July 17, 2025, Situation Room meeting packed with senior administration officials, as CNN reported based on an excerpt from the forthcoming book "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
The scene described in the excerpt is remarkable for its candor: the vice president, the deputy attorney general, the chief of staff, the press secretary, and the communications director, all seated in the Situation Room, while the attorney general and the FBI director listened by phone. The subject was not a national security crisis in the traditional sense. It was how to handle the political fallout from thousands of pages of Epstein-related documents that kept Trump's name in the headlines.
Vance told the room the Epstein file saga was "a huge problem," the book states. His proposed solution: have the White House approach Carlson to sit down with Maxwell in prison. The logic, as described in the excerpt, was straightforward. If Maxwell was "willing to state" that Trump had not participated in Epstein's wrongdoing, a high-profile interview on a friendly platform could settle the matter with Trump's own base, where calls for transparency had been growing.
Then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche laid out the administration's options and offered to conduct the interview with Maxwell himself. Blanche followed through. A week after the Situation Room meeting, he sat across from Maxwell and questioned her directly.
The meeting's attendees, as listed in the book excerpt, read like a who's who of Trump's inner circle. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and Communications Director Steven Cheung were present in the room. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel joined by phone.
One more detail from the meeting stands out. The White House counsel raised the possibility of pardoning Maxwell or reducing her sentence. Several officials expressed what the book describes as "strong disapproval." The book does not identify which counsel floated the idea or which officials objected.
Blanche's interview with Maxwell produced transcripts that were released later that summer. In them, Maxwell said she never witnessed anything improper in Trump's friendship with Epstein and never heard allegations that Trump acted inappropriately. She received limited immunity for the interview so she could discuss her criminal case. The Justice Department did not promise any other benefits in exchange for her testimony, the transcripts showed.
One week after the Blanche interview, Maxwell was moved from a Florida prison to a lower-security federal prison camp in Texas. Maxwell had been sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking minor girls for Epstein.
The timing of that transfer, days after she provided statements favorable to the president, is the kind of sequence that invites scrutiny. The book excerpt, as described by CNN, does not establish a direct connection between the interview and the transfer. But the proximity is hard to ignore, and it will almost certainly fuel questions from both sides of the aisle.
The broader backdrop to the Situation Room meeting was the slow, grinding release of Epstein-related documents by the Justice Department. Congress had passed a law forcing the department to release the files. Even so, the administration resisted for months before beginning to publish them in December.
When the documents finally came out, Trump's name appeared more than 1,000 times. The files included a list of unverified assault allegations against Trump compiled by FBI officials. They also contained FBI notes about a woman who accused Trump in a lawsuit of raping her when she was 13 years old. And they included an FBI interview with an individual described as one of Epstein's victims who stated that Maxwell once "presented her" to Trump at a party.
The Justice Department said the allegations against Trump in the documents were false. CNN noted there is no public evidence the FBI ever deemed those allegations credible. Trump has long denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein and has denied all allegations of sexual misconduct.
Members of Congress continue interviewing people who appear in the files about the extent of their relationships with Epstein.
What makes the July 17 meeting noteworthy is not just the proposal itself but what it reveals about the level of concern inside the White House. This was not a casual hallway conversation. It was a formal Situation Room gathering with the most senior officials in the administration, the kind of meeting typically reserved for military operations or imminent threats.
Vance's instinct, push for maximum transparency and get ahead of the story, reflects a political calculation that the drip-drip of Epstein file releases was doing more damage than a full accounting ever could. His push to voluntarily release all Epstein-related files as soon as possible, as the book describes, suggests he understood that resistance was feeding the narrative rather than containing it.
That Blanche stepped in to conduct the interview himself, rather than letting a media figure like Carlson handle it, may have been the more cautious path. A sitting deputy attorney general interviewing a federal prisoner about the president's conduct carries its own weight, but it avoids the spectacle of a cable-news-style production inside a federal facility.
"Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump" is set for publication on June 23. The excerpt was published in The New York Times. Haberman and Swan are veteran political reporters with deep sourcing inside Trump's orbit. CNN reported that it reached out to the White House, the Justice Department, and The Tucker Carlson Network for comment on the claims in the book excerpt. Whether any of those parties responded is not stated.
Books of this kind, sourced to anonymous insiders, published on tight timelines, sold on the strength of their most dramatic revelations, deserve careful reading. The claims here are attributed to a specific meeting on a specific date with specific attendees. That level of detail makes them harder to dismiss than vague "sources say" assertions. But they remain, for now, the account of two journalists whose work readers can evaluate for themselves.
Several questions hang over this account. Which White House counsel proposed a pardon or sentence reduction for Maxwell? Which officials shot it down? Did the Tucker Carlson interview idea go any further after Blanche volunteered to do it himself? And what, precisely, prompted Maxwell's transfer to a lower-security facility in Texas so soon after she gave testimony favorable to the president?
The specific law Congress passed to force the file release is not named in the excerpt. The full scope of what the files contain, and what they don't, is still being sorted through by lawmakers and investigators.
None of these gaps invalidate the core account. But they leave room for interpretation that partisans on both sides will fill according to their priors.
What the episode does show, clearly, is an administration that took the Epstein file problem seriously enough to convene its most powerful officials in the most secure room in the White House. Whether the proposed solution, a friendly interview with a convicted sex trafficker, was shrewd crisis management or a misstep in judgment is a question the public can now weigh for itself.
When the government's best idea for clearing the president's name involves negotiating with a woman serving 20 years for trafficking minors, the problem may be bigger than any interview can fix.