Jess Michaels, who was harmed by convicted child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, accused Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche of misleading victims during a recent meeting.
Michaels talked to MS NOW’s Alex Witt on Saturday about the meeting between Blanche and Epstein survivors that happened earlier this week.
Blanche had said during his Senate confirmation hearing that he couldn’t meet with survivors if they had a lawyer with them.
Michaels said Blanche scrambled after public pressure from lawmakers — and he even tried passing off the meeting to his assistant:
It was very clear he was taking the meeting because he wants this promotion because initially what was passed off to us was meeting with his assistant and when we said no, he, he then scrambled and said, okay, well, I could be there before 2:00, but we had already left the Capitol and so we couldn’t get there before 2:00.
And we requested another meeting. And finally he agreed to personally meet with us at 4:30 in the afternoon on Thursday.
And I mean, I think his attempt at empathy and compassion really came off as patronizing and condescending. So I did not feel that he was a public servant there addressing crime victims that had that experienced horrific abuse.
The planned 30-minute meeting went on for more than two hours, but the two sides didn’t agree on much, Michaels explained.
The only thing Blanche agreed with victims on was that the Department of Justice and FBI had messed up the first Epstein investigation.
Epstein died by apparent suicide in 2019 while in prison, facing charges of sex trafficking.
Michaels said Blanche kept saying there’s nothing in the files about Epstein’s case that could be used for a new investigation.
“He wouldn’t say there was any hope for us,” she said.
Michaels and others felt like they were being tricked or lied to during the meeting, even though they were giving real information that could be used by the authorities.
“It felt like we were hitting a wall when trying to talk to him about — But what about this?
But why can’t you look at that?We were giving him information he could have talked about, but we were gaslit.We were skipped over.It was frustrating, to say the least,” she said.
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