(Dobbs) "He was a gentleman in all respects.”

If the truth about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein is damaging, would anyone expect Ghislaine Maxwell to implicate the president when he’s the one man who could give her her life back?

So let me see if I’ve got this straight?

In the late July prison interview released yesterday between Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s “Girl Friday,” and Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s number two at the Department of Justice, Maxwell told Blanche, “I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

Then Blanche asked Maxwell, ”Did you ever hear Mr. Epstein or anybody say that President Trump had done anything inappropriate with masseuses or with anybody in your world?” Maxwell answered, “Absolutely never, in any context.”

It might be true. Maybe when Donald Trump told New York Magazine in an interview about Epstein in 2002, “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” he knew nothing about Epstein’s horrible hustle trafficking in underage women for sex and never took part in that piece of Epstein’s life.

But if Trump was involved, how likely is it— especially when Maxwell is talking to the president’s deputy attorney general— how likely is it that a woman still facing down 17 years in federal prison would implicate the one man in a position to set her free?

In what world would that ever happen?

For that matter, in what world would anyone believe a woman like Ghislaine Maxwell? In addition to convictions for conspiring with Epstein to recruit, groom, and traffic in teenage girls— as the U.S. attorney put it at her sentencing, for “perpetuating heinous crimes against children”— she was indicted on two counts of perjury.

Yet she also told Blanche in the prison interview, “I didn't know, nobody knew what was going on. And he (Epstein) was in 71st Street and I was in 65th Street, my house.” She was convicted by a jury because she was lying. She was convicted because she did know what was going on and was at the center of it. Blanche, who was Trump’s personal defense lawyer for his criminal indictments last year, surely understands that.

So yes, Donald Trump might be innocent of any role in hers and Epstein’s crimes, but not because she says he is.

Two other things also stretch credibility.

First, that only a week after Maxwell professed, for the record, that Donald Trump was not involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s teenage sex ring, she was transferred from a tougher federal prison in Florida to a minimum security prison in Texas.

This flew in the face of federal guidelines for convicted sex offenders like her. Suddenly, like a gift from heaven, the life of this wicked woman got better. When the Justice Department was asked why a sexual offender like Maxwell got reassigned to a country club prison, it told reporters to ask the Bureau of Prisons. When they asked the Bureau of Prisons, it refused to comment.

So it is not irrationally far-fetched to ask, was it a gift from Donald Trump? It could have been a not-so-subtle message to Maxwell to keep her mouth shut unless she wants to go back to harder time in Florida.

And second, no one ever would even have conceived of the involvement of any other president in the 21st century with teenage girls. Not Joe Biden, not Barack Obama, not George W. Bush. It would have sounded outlandish. But suspicions about Donald Trump don’t, not when he’s the guy who bragged that when he was with Hollywood starlets, he could “grab ‘em by the pussy,” not when he was convicted of sexual assault against the writer Jean Carroll, not when he was separately convicted of crimes connected to hush money he paid to porn star Stormy Daniels.

So I’ll say it one more time: maybe Ghislaine Maxwell is telling the truth about Donald Trump. Maybe his hands are clean.

But if the truth about Trump is far more damaging, would anyone expect her to expose it when he’s the one man who could give her her life back?

Any questions?

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net