MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell says CNN plumbed "a new dark low" by interviewing President Donald Trump via text message on Saturday -- and asking not a single question about convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of the late Jeffrey Epstein.
The "Last Word" host on Monday excoriated the exchange between Trump and CNN's Jake Tapper, who shared Trump's responses about Israel-Palestine and the U.S. government shutdown, while noting that he's still waiting for answers to several other questions.
"What were those questions?" O'Donnell asked. "Exactly which questions did Donald Trump refuse to answer? What could be more relevant in reporting an exchange that is supposed to be with the president of the United States than including the questions he refused to answer?"
He added, "Any questions about Jeffrey Epstein or his sex-trafficking friend Ghislaine Maxwell? Any questions about Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell? We don't know. We have no idea. We have no idea what the other questions were."
Epstein died in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. His death and known ties to powerful people fueled theories of a "client list," which Trump officials said in February would be released -- before Trump changed course and called the case and documents a "hoax."
Epstein once called Trump his "closest friend"; their past outings are well-documented. Maxwell is serving 20 years for helping traffic Epstein's victims, meanwhile, and saw her appeal rejected Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court -- leaving her with one last option.
"Maxwell has only one hope left of getting out of prison, her old friend Donald Trump," O'Donnell said. "And today, CNN's White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins asked the best question of the day, which revealed that Donald Trump will consider pardoning his old friend."
Trump said in 2020 when asked about Maxwell's then-recent arrest, "I wish her well."
When asked Monday about potentially pardoning her, Trump told Collins he hasn't heard Maxwell’s name “in so long.” He then answered her question evasively, stating he’d “have to take a look” at her case and that he “wouldn’t consider it or not consider it.”
"That's the kind of gibberish that comes out of his mouth all the time," O'Donnell said Monday after playing a clip of the Oval Office exchange. "That's impossible -- you have to do one or the other. You have to consider it or not consider it, you can't do both."
"But that's what he says, and that's what they think are answers," he continued about the reporters confronting Trump. "'I'll look at it,' he said. 'I'll look at it. I'll look at it.' But she was convicted of child sex trafficking. 'Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna have to take a look at it.'"
O'Donnell went on to wager that the president wants to do so because Maxwell is "an old friend," and because Maxwell told Trump's former criminal defense lawyer, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, that she never witnessed the president doing anything illegal.
Maxwell claimed as much in an interview with Blanche in July, before she was curiously transferred from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security facility in Texas. Maxwell, who groomed and trafficked children, might now be eligible for work release.
O'Donnell, who previously excoriated members of the press for letting Trump avoid questions about his past ties to Epstein and Maxwell, said Monday that CNN allowed him to become "the first president in history to get questions in writing for an interview."
"Questions that he could take home, as it were, since he was at home," he added. "Questions from a reporter. And then Donald Trump was allowed to take, we don't know how much time, to reply to those questions. We do know CNN is still waiting for some of them."