Mother Jones illustration; Jon Elswick/AP
One easy-to-resolve mystery of the Jeffrey Epstein case remains unanswered: Why was Ghislaine Maxwell transferred last year to a minimum-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas, that houses mainly nonviolent offenders and white-collar crooks?
This puzzling relocation occurred after Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general (and formerly Donald Trump’s personal attorney), traveled to Tallahassee, Florida, to interview Maxwell for hours, during which she praised Trump and said she had never witnessed him engaging in sexual misconduct.
At the time of her chat with Blanche, Maxwell—who is serving a 20-year sentence for procuring minors for Epstein to sexually abuse—was locked up in a medium-security, co-ed facility. The Bryan facility is a cushier, women-only prison that offers yoga classes and a puppy program for inmates. The government has never provided an explanation of why Epstein’s chief collaborator was moved to Bryan, which at the time was home to disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star and fraudster Jen Shah.
Looking for answers, last summer I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request with the Bureau of Prisons asking for information related to this transfer. Specifically:
all records mentioning or referencing Maxwell’s transfer to Federal Prison Camp Byran. This includes emails, memoranda, transfer orders, phone messages, texts, electronic chats, and any other communications, whether internal to BOP or between BOP personnel and any other governmental or nongovernmental personnel
The BOP did not rush to provide the information. After months of delay, the agency noted it would take up to nine months to fulfill this request.
So we sued.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal assistance to journalists, filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington, DC, on behalf of the Center for Investigative Reporting (which publishes Mother Jones), to compel the BOP to provide the relevant records. The filing notes that the BOP violated the Freedom of Information Act by initially failing to respond in a timely manner.
Now the matter is before a judge in federal district court in Washington, DC. In a filing submitted in the case earlier this month, the BOP provided both an eye-popping disclosure and some disturbing news.
The BOP reported that in response to this FOIA request it “has completed its initial search and identified 15.8 GB of potentially responsive records, which has crashed BOP’s system during the download process several times due to the large number of records. This is an extremely large amount of information and BOP is currently downloading the records.” The agency estimates that there may be “approximately 120,000 pages of material to review.”
Possibly 120,000 pages related to this one transfer? So many documents the system crashed? That seems a rather large pile. Far beyond what might be expected. The final number of responsive documents could be much smaller. But why might there be a mountain of material?
The BOP said that once it downloads the material, it will “conduct a responsiveness and deduplication review” and that it hopes to complete that process by June 19. This is just the first step. The bureau states that given the “large volume or records” and “the large number of records that must be reviewed,” it cannot “at this time to propose a schedule for processing of records.” Which means there’s no telling when the BOP will actually review and then (possibly) release documents related to Maxwell’s transfer.
A quick review is not likely, especially since the BOP filing also notes that its FOIA office is a mess:
On February 28, 2025, four senior staff members of the BOP FOIA Office, including the former Supervisory Attorney, left the agency. BOP currently has only two attorneys covering FOIA litigation across the country. One of these attorneys is still in training and in their probationary period. BOP FOIA Staff, including attorneys and processors, are currently handling, or assisting with, over 50 active cases in multiple federal districts. Additionally, BOP currently has a backlog of over 7,400 FOIA requests pending.
What’s happened in the BOP FOIA office is representative of the collapse of FOIA throughout the federal government under the second Trump administration. Cutbacks in staff and likely an increase in antipathy toward openness have led to sharp increases in backlogged FOIA requests.
In 2025, the backlog of FOIA requests at the Defense Department increased by 42 percent to 27,000 requests. One reason is clear: Across all its components, the Pentagon experienced a 37-percent loss or turnover in FOIA officers. At the State Department, according to a recent report from its chief FOIA officer, “staff attrition and contract downsizing left several key FOIA leadership and staff positions vacant,” and its backlogged cases went up by 6,000 to nearly 28,000 requests.
In March, the Department of Health and Human Services shut down FOIA units at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. Last month, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insisted he would be restoring all the FOIA offices. Still, that’s unlikely to do enough to address the department’s dreadfully slow response time to FOIA requests that averages 490 days and its own huge backlog, which increased by 12 percent last year.
In November, Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting filed a lawsuit to compel HHS to process its FOIA requests. “FOIA guarantees the public and the press access to information about what our government is actually doing—information that’s crucial for democracy to work,” says Peter Bibring, a civil rights attorney who prepared the lawsuit. “The government can’t use cost-cutting and efficiency as excuses to violate the law and keep the public in the dark.”
News about Maxwell keeps emerging. Inmates at the minimum security prison camp where she now lives recently told CNN that she receives “special treatment” and that those who speak out about this are “punished.” The favoritism showed Maxwell has included allowing her to hold private meetings with visitors in the prison chapel—a privilege not afforded other inmates.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have been discussing whether Trump should offer Maxwell a pardon in exchange for her then cooperating with the House Government Oversight Committee, which has been investigating the Epstein case. (The US government has previously assailed Maxwell for her “willingness to lie brazenly under oath about her conduct”.) Committee Democrats, who oppose such a deal, have called for investigating Maxwell’s prison transfer.
Partly as a result of Trump’s war on the federal government, the FOIA system—always creaky and prone to infuriating and excessive delays—has become much worse, belying Trump’s claims of increasing transparency and accountability. But here’s the thing: The public and the press shouldn’t need to rely on FOIA to obtain an explanation of Maxwell’s transfer. The BOP, which is part of the Justice Department, could just say why this happened.
The bureau’s reluctance to do so suggests there’s a good reason to file a FOIA request—and to fight in court for those thousands of pages.