US Department of Justice renews push to unseal Epstein and Maxwell grand jury materials
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
US Attorney-General Pam Bondi has filed requests to the New York judges overseeing the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cases.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Follow topic:
WASHINGTON – The US Justice Department asked federal judges to unseal grand jury material from the criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, citing the recently enacted law on Epstein documents
US Attorney-General Pam Bondi on Nov 24 filed requests to the New York judges overseeing the Epstein and Maxwell cases.
Late last week, the government also asked a judge in Florida to unseal grand jury transcripts and exhibits from an earlier federal criminal investigation there.
Grand jury proceedings are covered by strict secrecy laws.
In the face of Congressional criticism over the Trump administration’s failure to release its Epstein files in July New York grand jury materials
Epstein was indicted on sex-trafficking charges by a New York grand jury in 2019 but died by suicide before he could stand trial.
Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, was convicted on similar charges in December 2021 and is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.
The earlier Florida case resulted in a highly criticised 2008 plea deal that saw Epstein serve only about a year in prison.
The New York judges who rejected the administration’s requests for grand jury materials over the summer both suggested the moves were designed to divert attention from the far larger volume of Epstein-related material held by the Justice Department and not subject to grand jury secrecy rules.
US District Judge Richard Berman, who presided over the New York Epstein case, said in August that the Justice Department motion “appears to be a ‘diversion’ from the breadth and scope of the Epstein files in the government’s possession”.
Similarly, US District Judge Paul Engelmayer, reviewing the request in Maxwell’s case, said that though the government “implies that the grand jury materials are an untapped mine lode of undisclosed information about Epstein or Maxwell or confederates, they definitively are not that. There is no ‘there’ there”. BLOOMBERG
