The Trump administration’s move to unseal grand jury information in the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cases was always a narrow effort, legally speaking, because grand jury presentations generally deal with narrow sets of evidence presented for the purposes of indicting specific people. The bar for securing indictments is famously low, as far as legal standards go (hence the old saying about how a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich).
So even if the administration were to succeed in its effort to unseal the Epstein and Maxwell transcripts, it’s difficult to see how the result would satisfy the political demands from President Donald Trump’s supporters to release all the information the government has related to Epstein. It is that political controversy, of course, that is driving the legal effort.
The Justice Department’s latest court filing in support of unsealing in New York reinforces how limited the information is that might be revealed if the government succeeds, at least when it comes to identifying other potential perpetrators.
Administration lawyers wrote in a memorandum, filed Tuesday, that just one witness (an FBI agent) testified to the Epstein grand jury and two witness in Maxwell’s — that same agent and a detective. It’s unsurprising that there wasn’t a parade of witnesses in the grand jury because such a parade is unnecessary to secure indictments.
Epstein died in 2019 in what the medical examiner deemed a suicide while being held on his charges, and Maxwell was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors. She’s appealing her conviction while separately pressing Trump for clemency.
We don’t know what the two witnesses told the Epstein and Maxwell grand juries. The new DOJ court memo said, “Consistent with applicable rules concerning the admissibility of hearsay testimony, the grand jury witnesses described statements of others, including statements of and concerning victims, many of whom are still alive.”
But on top of the possibility that any transcripts released would also be redacted at key points, the expectation for any new revelations to come out of this effort should be tempered. Again, that’s if DOJ can convince judges that it should succeed even in this narrow effort, which remains to be seen.
Tuesday’s filing followed initial DOJ motions on the Epstein and Maxwell dockets that New York judges last week deemed lacking. The judges gave the government a chance to try again by providing more information.
That led to Tuesday’s filing, which was also notable for its apparent admission that the government hadn’t notified victims when it made its initial motions. In response to judicial orders to say whether it had given such notice, Tuesday’s memo said the government “has now” done so, suggesting it had done so only after being asked whether it had. (The memo said the government provided notice “to all but one of the victims who are referenced in the grand jury transcripts at issue in this motion. The Government has attempted to contact the remaining victim, but such efforts have been unsuccessful.”) A judge in Florida previously rejected a separate DOJ effort to unseal Epstein grand jury transcripts in that state. As for New York, we won’t likely immediately learn whether the DOJ’s latest memo will convince the judges. The judges have also said that Maxwell, a representative for Epstein and victims can submit their positions on the matter by August 5. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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