Disgraced financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein's longtime accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell has gotten a sweetheart upgrade in prison in return for an interview with the Justice Department in which she distanced President Donald Trump from Epstein's crimes. But living it up in a luxury Texas prison camp likely isn't enough for her, Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown told MS NOW's Ali Velshi on Friday — she wants an outright pardon.

And she may have a strategy in the works to try to force Trump's hand on the issue, she continued.

"Julie, let's talk about Ghislaine Maxwell, because there's a lot of headlines about her," said Velshi. "There's a lot of machination on her part to get commutation of her sentence. Nobody in the administration has said that's a nonstarter. But this is a convicted sex offender who already, as a result of a very unorthodox interview with the deputy attorney general, seems to have been getting preferential treatment."

"What's your sense of what Ghislaine Maxwell's role in this current set of developments can be?" Velshi asked.

"Well, I think that she's aiming for a pardon," agreed Brown. "I think that she has — I think she knows a lot of information. She obviously knows who was involved with Epstein, who helped Epstein. She really can provide a key for exactly how it operated. But of course, during her trial and even after, she's claimed she didn't know anything, she had no information."

"So I personally suspect that she's going to start — if she doesn't seem like she's going to get a pardon, I think she's going to, if she hasn't already started, leaking information in order to send a message to some of these important people that she knows where the skeletons are," said Brown. "And I just think that she's just waiting and wondering what's going to come out before she starts really moving forward with a pardon or a commutation of her sentence."

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