The former girlfriend of Epstein invoked her right to silence on Monday while appearing before US House lawmakers but her lawyers said she would speak in exchange for clemency.
The House Oversight Committee had wanted Maxwell to answer questions during a video call to the federal prison camp in Texas where she's serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, but she invoked her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid answering questions that would be self-incriminating.
Maxwell has come under new scrutiny as lawmakers try to investigate how Epstein, a well-connected financier, was able to sexually abuse underage girls for years.
Amid a reckoning over Epstein's abuse that has spilled into the highest levels of businesses and governments around the globe, lawmakers are searching for anyone who was connected to Epstein and may have facilitated his abuse.
So far, the revelations have shown how both Trump and former president Bill Clinton spent time with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s, but they have not been credibly accused of wrongdoing.
Dressed in a brown, prison-issued shirt and sitting at a conference table, Maxwell repeatedly said she was invoking "my Fifth Amendment right to silence," video later released by the committee showed.
During the closed-door deposition, Maxwell's lawyer David Oscar Markus said in a statement to the committee that "Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump".
He added that both Trump and Clinton "are innocent of any wrongdoing" but that "Ms Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to that explanation".
Democrats said that was a brazen effort by Maxwell to have Trump end her prison sentence.
"It's very clear she's campaigning for clemency," said Melanie Stansbury, a New Mexico Democrat.
Asked about Maxwell's appeal, the White House pointed to previous remarks from the president that indicated the prospect of a pardon was not on his radar.
Maxwell has also been seeking to have her conviction overturned, arguing that she was wrongfully convicted.
The Supreme Court rejected her appeal last year, but in December she requested that a federal judge in New York consider what her lawyers describe as "substantial new evidence" that her trial was spoiled by constitutional violations.
Maxwell's lawyer cited that petition as he told lawmakers she would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights.
Family members of the late Virginia Giuffre, one of the most outspoken victims of Epstein, also released a letter to Maxwell making it clear they did not consider her "a bystander" to Epstein's abuse.
"You were a central, deliberate actor in a system built to find children, isolate them, groom them, and deliver them to abuse," Sky and Amanda Roberts wrote in the letter addressed to Maxwell.
Maxwell was moved from a federal prison in Florida to a low-security prison camp in Texas last summer after she participated in two-days of interviews with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Meanwhile, several lawmakers visited a Justice Department office in Washington Monday to look through unredacted versions of the files on Epstein that the department has released to comply with a law passed by Congress last year.
As part of an arrangement with the Justice Department, lawmakers were given access to the over three million released files in a reading room with four computers. Lawmakers can only make handwritten notes.
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