The Justice Department on Friday asked a court to unseal grand jury transcripts in the sex trafficking cases of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
The motion, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida by Attorney General Pam Bondi, follows the congressional passage this week of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a bill that compels the Justice Department to release all unclassified records related to Epstein within 30 days.
“In the light of the Act’s clear mandate, the Court should authorize the Department of Justice to release the grand jury transcripts and lift any preexisting protective orders that would otherwise prevent public disclosure,” the Justice Department wrote in its motion.
It stated that it would “make appropriate redactions of victim-related and other personal identifying information.”
The motion, which was also signed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Attorney Jason Quinones, asks the court to “lift any and all preexisting protective orders that would prevent the Department from complying with the Act.”
The Justice Department filed an expedited ruling given the Epstein Act’s 30-day deadline.
President Trump, who at one time had a friendship with Epstein and had been against the bill, dropped his opposition and signed it into law on Wednesday. Mr. Trump, who cut ties with Epstein years ago, has not been accused of wrongdoing.
In July 2019, a New York federal grand jury indicted Epstein on child sex trafficking charges, about five weeks before he was found dead in a Manhattan jail. His death was later ruled a suicide.
Then, in June 2020, a New York federal grand jury indicted Maxwell, Epstein’s former partner, of conspiring with Epstein and helping to facilitate and operate his sex trafficking ring. She was convicted in December 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
This marks the latest attempt by the Justice Department to unseal Epstein and Maxwell’s grand jury records.
In August, a New York judge denied a similar Justice Department request to unseal grand jury material in the Maxwell case, arguing that 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.”
Epstein, a wealthy financier known for his connections to political elites and high-profile people, was under federal probes for decades over allegations of sex trafficking. In 2008, he pleaded guilty in Florida to state charges of soliciting prostitution in exchange for having a federal case against him dropped. He served 13 months in county jail and had to register as a sex offender.
The Epstein case received renewed attention starting in July when the Justice Department released a two-page memo stating that a “systematic review” had “revealed” that Epstein had “incriminating ‘client list,’ and that “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”
The memo, which prompted an outcry from Epstein accusers, came after Bondi had said in a February interview that there was an Epstein client list “sitting on my desk right now.”
Several batches of Epstein-linked documents have been intermittently released throughout the years. The latest such release occurred earlier this month, when a tranche of tens of thousands of pages of documents were released by both House Democrats and the House Oversight Committee.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/justice-department-requests-unseal-epstein-maxwell-grand-jury-records/
