Why Maxwell took the Fifth is John Kiriakou’s answer to a viewer’s question about whether Ghislaine Maxwell might receive a pardon in return for her silence — a premise he corrects before answering.
The correction
“Well, she didn’t testify. She went She She She took the fifth on everything.”[1]
His interlocutor supplied the reading Kiriakou then endorses: that she declined because nothing was on offer, and had no reason to speak.[1]
What would normally be offered
Kiriakou sets out the range of ordinary inducements. “At the very least they would normally have offered limited immunity. At the most they would have let her just speak her peace and and she couldn’t be prosecuted for anything.”[1]
The precedent he reaches for is Iran-Contra. “That’s how Oliver North ended up never going to prison. Because he was offered immunity, he testified, the Justice Department then tried to charge him, and the Supreme Court said, ‘You can’t charge him because Congress gave him immunity, so nothing he said can be used against him.’ He ended up not seeing a day in jail.”[2]
What happened instead
On Kiriakou’s account nothing of the kind was attempted with Maxwell. “I think they just didn’t offer her anything. They just subpoenaed her at the prison said, ‘Come and testify.’ And she said, ‘Not a chance.’” His closing comment is about the committee rather than the witness: “I don’t know what what they thought would happen.”[2]
On the pardon question itself Kiriakou did not give the reassuring answer his interlocutor wanted; the concern raised in the same exchange was that no president could be imagined commuting the sentence of a convicted child trafficker at that scale, and Kiriakou let the worry stand.[3]