On Feb. 9, 2026, Ghislaine Maxwell finally sat for a deposition with the House Oversight Committee, which had subpoenaed her the previous July. She appeared by video from the federal prison camp in Texas where she is serving a 20-year sentence for helping Jeffrey Epstein traffic teenage girls. Dressed in a brown prison shirt, she answered nothing. More than a dozen times she said she was invoking her Fifth Amendment right to silence, citing a habeas petition pending in federal court in New York.

Her lawyer, David Oscar Markus, then made an offer. Maxwell, he said, was prepared to speak fully and honestly if President Trump granted her clemency, and would testify that neither Trump nor Bill Clinton had done anything wrong in their dealings with Epstein. Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, released the full video that evening and said he opposed clemency or immunity. Democrats called her robotic and unrepentant and said she was campaigning for a pardon. Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna posted a two-word answer: “NO CLEMENCY.”

The White House pointed to earlier remarks suggesting a pardon wasn’t on the president’s radar, though Trump has never ruled one out. The deposition had been delayed for months while Maxwell pursued a Supreme Court appeal, which she lost. After a 2025 interview with the Justice Department, she was moved from a Florida prison to the lower-security camp in Texas.