A federal judge on Wednesday denied the Trump Justice Department’s motion to unseal grand jury transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein’s New York sex trafficking case, dealing the DOJ its latest loss on the subject, in a ruling that spotlights the government’s bumbling legal effort and lack of transparency in the Epstein scandal.
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Richard Berman follows an Aug. 11 decision from another judge in New York that rejected the DOJ’s motion to unseal transcripts in the case of convicted Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as a July ruling from a judge in Florida rejecting DOJ’s Epstein-related unsealing effort in that state.
Ruling against the DOJ in the Maxwell case, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer wrote that “[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.”
Similarly rejecting the effort in Epstein’s case specifically, Berman wrote Wednesday that the unsealing motion appeared to be a diversion from the full scope of Epstein-related files in the government’s possession. He wrote that the grand jury testimony is just a “hearsay snippet” of Epstein’s alleged conduct, and that the information in the Epstein grand jury transcripts “pales in comparison” with the information in the DOJ’s hands. He also criticized the government for not properly notifying victims before filing the motion.
Epstein died in 2019 while being held on trafficking charges in New York, with the medical examiner deeming his death a suicide. Maxwell was subsequently convicted and is appealing while simultaneously seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump. After she met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, the government moved Maxwell to a minimum-security facility. That raised speculation about what benefits the administration might grant her as the White House faces political backlash from its refusal to release all the Epstein-related information in its possession, as promised. 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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