Two federal judges sent a message to the Trump administration about its attempt to unseal grand jury transcripts related to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell: Try again.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had filed unsealing motions on both the Epstein and Maxwell dockets amid the political backlash President Donald Trump has faced for his administration’s refusal to make public all Epstein-related materials as promised.
Of course, unsealing these grand jury materials wouldn’t disclose all known government information related to Epstein, who died in custody in 2019 in what the medical examiner deemed a suicide.
But even this relatively limited grand jury information won’t be forthcoming, at least not until the DOJ satisfies legal requirements that it failed to fulfill in Blanche’s unsealing motions.
The judges’ orders on Tuesday come as Blanche announced his intention the same day to meet with Maxwell and ask her: “what do you know?”
Blanche noted that the Justice Department hadn’t previously asked that question of the woman who was charged during the first Trump administration and convicted in 2021 of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors. She has a pending Supreme Court petition trying to overturn her conviction and 20-year sentence; the DOJ opposed her petition last week, and the high court has not yet said whether it will consider her appeal.
The orders sending Blanche back to the drawing board on Tuesday came from U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer, an Obama appointee who’s presiding over the Maxwell docket, and U.S. District Judge Richard Berman, a Clinton appointee who’s handling the Epstein docket. Both judges are in the Southern District of New York, where Maxwell and Epstein were charged. The orders are similarly worded; you can read the Maxwell one here and the Epstein one here.
Both orders say that the judges intend to resolve the unsealing motions “expeditiously” but that Blanche’s filings were inadequate. The judges gave the DOJ a week, until July 29, to file a more detailed memorandum making the case for unsealing. Among other things, the judges said the DOJ has to say in the memorandum whether it reviewed the grand jury transcripts in question before making the requests and whether victims were notified. In addition to the government’s memoranda, the judges said filings on the matter are due from Maxwell, Epstein’s representative and victims by Aug. 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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