Denying the Justice Department’s motion to unseal Ghislaine Maxwell grand jury transcripts on Monday, a federal judge rejected the DOJ’s professed interest in transparency as disingenuous. What the judge described as the government’s feigned interest in revealing Jeffrey Epstein-related information puts a finer point on a separate new lawsuit regarding the Trump administration’s handling of the matter.
The lawsuit, from nonprofit Democracy Forward, seeks to shed light on the administration’s actions by asking a judge in Washington, D.C., to order the government to comply with the Freedom of Information Act. The group filed Freedom of Information Act requests, detailed in its complaint filed Friday, seeking senior administration officials’ “communications regarding the Epstein matter, including those regarding correspondence between President Trump and Epstein, as well as records concerning agency review of the Epstein matter.”
The suit has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over Donald Trump’s federal election interference case, which the DOJ moved to dismiss after he won the 2024 presidential election.
The legal claim in the new suit is that the government failed to comply with FOIA by not granting speedy processing of the group’s requests under the federal transparency law.
“By failing to grant Plaintiff’s requests for expedited processing on Plaintiff’s FOIA requests concerning matters of widespread and exceptional media interest in which there exist possible questions about the government’s integrity that affect public confidence, … and national urgent need to inform the public, … [government] Defendants have violated FOIA,” the complaint alleges. The administration will have an opportunity to respond in court. How it does so will reveal its latest stance in the affair that has dogged the White House for its lack of transparency and failure to fulfill its promise to release the full Epstein records. 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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