Topline
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected the Justice Department’s request to unseal grand jury materials in its prosecution against Jeffrey Epstein, thwarting the Trump administration’s primary strategy to try and quell the public uproar over it refusing to release the full Epstein files—though the grand jury materials were unlikely to have revealed much information even if they had been released.
Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein at a party at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on February 12, 2000.
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Key Facts
New York Judge Richard Berman denied the DOJ’s request to make a number of documents public from the grand jury that decided to indict Epstein in 2019, including transcripts from the grand jury and exhibits that the grand jury was shown.
The Trump administration asked the court to unseal the materials in response to the public backlash over the DOJ’s memo announcing it would not release any further files on Epstein to the public.
Grand jury materials can typically only be made public under a very narrow set of circumstances, and while the Trump administration had argued that the Epstein case merited an exception due to the public interest in the case, Berman disagreed.
The judge wrote that while there is “certainly and appropriately lots of discussion about the Epstein case,” that interest is “legally insufficient” to justify the materials being released, and other factors also warrant the records remaining under seal, such as protecting the privacy and safety of Epstein’s victims.
Berman suggested the DOJ should instead release its own files in the Epstein case rather than ask for the grand jury materials to be unsealed, noting it is “the logical party” to release files on Epstein and that the information in the grand jury materials “pales in comparison” to the information “in the hands of the Department of Justice.”
The ruling comes after two other courts previously rejected other requests by the DOJ to unseal grand jury materials in cases against Epstein and associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
