The Trump Justice Department lost its motion to unseal grand jury transcripts and exhibits in Ghislaine Maxwell’s case, with a federal judge on Monday calling the whole premise behind the government’s effort “demonstrably false.”
That premise, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer in New York recounted in a scathing opinion, was that the grand jury details would shed new light on Jeffrey Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes or on the government’s investigation into them.
Engelmayer, an Obama appointee, noted that the Maxwell grand jury didn’t hear testimony from firsthand witnesses, victims or the like, but rather simply met “for the quotidian purpose of returning an indictment.” He said the evidence presented to the Maxwell grand jury “is today, with only very minor exceptions, a matter of public record.”
Rather than exposing new information, Engelmayer wrote, unsealing would expose the disingenuousness behind the government’s claim that unsealing would be revelatory.
“A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion — aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” the judge wrote.
“A member of the public familiar with the Maxwell trial record who reviewed the grand jury materials that the Government proposes to unseal would thus learn next to nothing new,” he wrote, adding that the materials “do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor.”
The judge’s ruling is unsurprising, as I previously wrote about the likely limited nature of what unsealing would reveal. Engelmayer’s opinion confirms that.
It comes amid the administration’s attempt to handle political backlash from President Donald Trump’s supporters over its refusal to release all the information it has related to Epstein, who died in 2019 while being held on sex trafficking charges. Maxwell was subsequently convicted and is appealing while speculation looms over whether Trump might pardon her or grant her any other sort of legal benefits. After she met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last month, the government moved Maxwell to a minimum-security facility — an unusual move that has furthered speculation over what sort of additional favorable treatment she might receive. Maxwell’s appeal is pending before the Supreme Court, and we could learn in the fall whether the justices will take it up. A federal judge in Florida previously rejected unsealing grand jury information related to Epstein. And still pending in New York is the government’s motion to unseal grand jury information in his case there, which the government has been litigating in tandem with the Maxwell unsealing effort. The judge overseeing Epstein’s New York case has not yet ruled, but given the apparently limited nature of the grand jury presentation in that case as well, he could rule in a similar fashion to Engelmayer. 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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