Recent reports indicate that the Department of Justice is considering a public release of the transcript of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche's recent interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, the incarcerated accomplice to deceased convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

A senior legal analyst for CNN expressed shock at the decidedly "uncommon" and "unheard of" idea, given Maxwell's status as an accomplice and witness to Epstein's alleged crimes and the likely highly sensitive nature of the conversation with Blanche, according to the Daily Caller.

There is also reportedly some serious debate within President Donald Trump's White House about the wisdom of releasing the Maxwell interview transcript, as there is uncertainty over whether it would satisfy those who've clamored for more transparency about Epstein or merely reignite a controversy that some believe has begun to die down.

Transcript release would be "extremely uncommon, almost unheard of"

On Tuesday, CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig appeared on "The Situation Room" with host Wolf Blitzer and reacted with some surprise to the network's separate reporting that a public release of the audio recording and transcript of Deputy Attorney General Blanche's 10-hour interview with Maxwell last month was under consideration.

"It’s extremely uncommon, almost unheard of," the analyst said. "If we’re talking about prosecutors going into a prison to speak with somebody who’s a defendant, who’s a potential cooperating witness, you would never publicize and put out and disclose publicly the interview that you had with that person."

"That would be an investigative file, that would be something you would keep in-house. You would never put it out," Honig added. "But of course, a lot of what we’ve seen here is happening outside of the normal track."

Epstein strategy meeting

According to CNN, per multiple unnamed sources, Vice President JD Vance will host a small gathering of top-level administration officials on Wednesday evening to discuss the idea of publicly releasing an audio recording and/or transcript of the interview with Maxwell.

The meeting will allegedly include White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy AG Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel, and other topics for discussion at the meeting will be the administration's strategy in handling the Epstein issue, as well as the need for a "unified response" across the administration.

There could also be some debate about whether Blanche should hold a formal press conference or perhaps appear more informally on a popular program with a large audience, such as Joe Rogan's podcast, to unveil some of what he learned from the Maxwell interview.

Those ideas reportedly sparked a significant internal conversation within the Trump White House about whether the public release of the Maxwell interview audio and/or transcript would be sufficient for those who've demanded more information or if it would just resurface the controversy that has embroiled the media for weeks and been exploited by anti-Trump Democrats for political gain.

"We’d like to release everything"

The report about the VP Vance-hosted meeting follows CNN's earlier reporting that the DOJ has been working to digitize, transcribe, and redact sensitive information, such as victims' names, from the more than 10 hours of audio recorded during Deputy AG Blanche's interview with Maxwell last month at the federal prison in Tallahassee, where she was serving a 20-year prison sentence before being recently transferred to a prison camp in Texas.

If the DOJ's plan to publicize the audio and/or transcript of that interview is approved, the release could happen within the next week or two, the network's sources claimed.

In an interview with Newsmax last week, President Trump seemed open to the idea but had some reservations, as he said broadly of the Epstein case and Blanche's interview with Maxwell, "We’d like to release everything, but we don’t want people to get hurt that shouldn’t be hurt, and I would assume that was why he was there."

However, when asked for confirmation of CNN's anonymously sourced reporting about the possible impending release of the audio and/or transcript, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung downplayed the idea and said, "This is nothing more than CNN trying desperately to create news out of old news. [Trump] already addressed this issue in an interview with Newsmax, a real news outlet that routinely gets better ratings than CNN."