Washington — A federal judge on Monday denied a request from the Trump administration to unseal grand jury material in the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, saying there is nothing in the grand jury record that would shed new light on the case.
Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected the Justice Department’s bid to unveil the material in a 31-page order Monday morning. In court filings, Justice Department lawyers argued the circumstances of the Maxwell case warranted the release of the grand jury transcripts and exhibits, which typically remain secret. Engelmayer rejected that argument.
“The Government’s invocation of special circumstances, however, fails at the threshold,” Engelmayer wrote. “Its entire premise — that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, or the Government’s investigation into them — is demonstrably false.”
“The materials do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor,” Engelmayer said. “They do not discuss or identify any client of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s. They do not reveal any heretofore unknown means or methods of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s crimes. They do not reveal new venues at which their crimes occurred. They do not reveal new sources of their wealth. They do not explore the circumstances of Epstein’s death. They do not reveal the path of the Government’s investigation.”
He said anyone “who reviewed these materials expecting, based on the Government’s representations, to learn new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes and the investigation into them, would come away feeling disappointed and misled. There is no ‘there’ there.”
In July, the Justice Department asked the judges overseeing the Maxwell and Epstein cases to release the grand jury material that formed the basis for the federal charges against them, a move that came amid uproar over the department’s review of the so-called “Epstein files” and decision not to release additional documents in the government’s possession. The basis for the Justice Department’s request was, as Engelmayer noted, that the grand jury documents “contain significant, undisclosed information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, or the investigation into them.”
But he pointed out that these grand juries had not been used for any investigative purpose, but rather had only been convened to return an indictment. He said no victim, eyewitness or suspect testified. Each of the two grand juries “received evidence on a single day,” hearing only from a single person, a summary witness who “testified to information obtained in the Government’s investigation to support the charges in the proposed indictment.”
Englemayer suggested that if the case were unsealed, 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.”
CBS News has reached out to Maxwell’s legal team for comment. Maxwell is continuing to contest her 2021 conviction.
Her attorneys argued against the Justice Department’s attempt to unseal the testimony and exhibits, writing that their client had “no choice but to respectfully oppose” the release.
In numerous court filings leading up to Engelmayer’s decision, the Justice Department acknowledged that the grand jury transcripts, containing testimony from only two law enforcement officials, were mostly already made public during Epstein and Maxwell’s court proceedings.
Engelmayer wrote that after a court review of the grand jury material, he found the release would “not reveal new information of any consequence.”
“They do not discuss or identify any client of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s. They do not reveal any heretofore unknown means or methods of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s crimes,” Engelmayer wrote. “They do not reveal new venues at which their crimes occurred. They do not reveal new sources of their wealth. They do not explore the circumstances of Epstein’s death. They do not reveal the path of the Government’s investigation.”
“Insofar as the motion to unseal 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,” Engelmayer continued, criticizing the Trump administration’s justification for unsealing the documents as “disingenuous.”
“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,” he wrote.
