Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein, has declined to answer questions from House lawmakers in a deposition but indicated that if US President Donald Trump ended her prison sentence, she was willing to testify that neither he nor former president Bill Clinton had done anything wrong in their connections with Epstein.

The US House Oversight Committee had wanted Maxwell to answer questions during a video call on Monday 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. She’s 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 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 with a bottle of water, 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 attorney 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 Representative Melanie Stansbury, a New Mexico Democrat.

Asked on Monday 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.

And other Republicans push backed to the notion quickly after Maxwell made the appeal.

“NO CLEMENCY. You comply or face punishment,” Republican lawmaker Anna Paulina Luna, wrote on social media. “You deserve JUSTICE for what you did you monster.”

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 attorneys describe as “substantial new evidence” that her trial was spoiled by constitutional violations.

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. (AP)