WASHINGTON — Two top House Democrats called on Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday to allow them to visit the minimum-security federal prison in Texas where Ghislaine Maxwell is being held and to interview the warden, citing reports they said they had received that she was receiving preferential treatment.

In a letter to Bondi, Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrats on the Judiciary and Oversight committees, said that more than a dozen people had come forward with whistleblower complaints about the treatment of Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein. They claimed that she had received unusual perks, like being able to use a laptop unsupervised and being given bottled water while other inmates drank tap water.

The lawmakers asserted that whistleblowers had told them that one person had been fired for reporting Maxwell’s treatment to Congress, which would be a violation of federal law.

In one case, inmates who were heard complaining about Maxwell were threatened with solitary confinement or a move to a high-security facility, according to the letter, a copy of which was viewed by The New York Times.

The documents showed that the prison’s warden, Tanisha Hall, “threatened inmates that if they so much as looked at the press, they would be transferred to mixed-sex prisons more than 1,000 miles away in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Connecticut,” the lawmakers wrote.

Raskin and Garcia also said they had received multiple reports suggesting that prison staff “may have tolerated, encouraged and even engaged in widespread sexual abuse and misconduct” of inmates.

Numerous complaints of sexual abuse were improperly investigated, they said, citing documents. In several instances, prison employees who were accused of sexual assault were not punished, while inmates and other employees who reported them were punished or threatened, according to the letter.

In one case, a female inmate reported being sexually abused by the prison chaplain, including in the chapel. After the inmate told officials she felt unsafe in the prison, she was transferred to higher-security institutions, while the chaplain was allowed to retire, according to the whistleblowers they cited.

“We are receiving troubling reports that the same federal law enforcement officials who showered Ms. Maxwell with preferential treatment and perks may also be covering up serious sexual abuse in that same facility,” Raskin and Garcia wrote.

The letter’s claims have not been independently confirmed by the Times. In a separate letter, the lawmakers asked the Justice Department’s inspector general, an internal watchdog, to open a criminal investigation into reports of prison employees’ misconduct.

Maxwell’s time at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, has been a focus of significant backlash since she was relocated there last summer.

Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and other charges, was transferred to the minimum-security prison about a week after she was interviewed by Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general. The move appeared to violate Bureau of Prison regulations, which hold that inmates designated as sex offenders are to be held in low-security prisons and not in minimum-security facilities.

Blanche has defended the move as necessary for Maxwell’s safety. But President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told Vanity Fair that Trump was “ticked” and “mighty unhappy” about the move, and that neither she nor the president knew why it had taken place.

Raskin and Garcia wrote that they were told that Maxwell had been allowed to watch cable news by herself in staff-only areas, and that the warden routinely sent out Maxwell’s mail under her own name to shield it from being “searched as with other inmates.”

Maxwell is scheduled for a deposition next month with the House Oversight Committee, which has been conducting an investigation of her, Epstein and the federal government’s handling of the sex-trafficking cases against them.

But Raskin and Garcia also said members of Congress and their staff wanted to visit the facility in Bryan next month to investigate the reports. They also demanded that Hall be made available for an interview with lawmakers on their committees.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Michael Gold/US DOJ
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