Ghislaine Maxwell on September 20, 2013 in New York City.
Laura Cavanaugh | Getty Images
A federal judge in New York on Monday rejected a request by the Justice Department to unseal grand jury transcripts related to the criminal investigation of Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted procurer for notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Judge Paul Engelmayer, in his ruling, scoffed at the Justice Department’s rationale for unsealing the Maxwell grand jury transcripts.
“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,” Engelmayer wrote in his decision in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Engelmayer said the Justice Department was being “disingenuous” in making that argument for disclosure.
The Justice Department sought the unsealing of grand jury material related to Maxwell and Epstein after harsh criticism of the Trump administration’s decision to not publicly release the investigative file on Epstein.
A federal judge in Florida on July 23 denied the department’s request to unseal grand jury transcripts about a probe of Epstein in that state by federal prosecutors in the mid-2000s.
The Justice Department’s request before another federal judge in Manhattan to unseal grand jury transcripts related to Epstein’s later indictment there is still pending.
Engelmayer, in his decision Monday on the Maxwell-related transcripts, quoted a 1973 legal ruling, which said that “the policy that ‘proceedings before a grand jury shall generally remain secret’ is ‘older than our Nation itself.’ “
Engelmayer also said that none of the arguments that the Justice Department cited for unsealing the transcripts met one of the exceptions authorizing the disclosure of grand jury materials allowed by the federal appeals court circuit that includes New York.
U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein appears in a photograph taken for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services’ sex offender registry March 28, 2017 and obtained by Reuters July 10, 2019.
New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services | Handout | Reuters
The judge also suggested that the Justice Department’s request was more about public relations than about having previously unknown information about Epstein and Mawell unsealed for the first time.
“The Court’s review confirmed that unsealing the grand jury materials would not reveal
new information of any consequence,” Engelmayer wrote.
“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.
“Contrary to the Government’s depiction, the Maxwell grand jury testimony is not a matter of significant historical or public interest,” Engelmayer wrote. “Far from it. It consists of garden-variety summary testimony by two law enforcement agents.”
Epstein was indicted by a grand jury in Manhattan after it heard testimony from an FBI agent about his alleged sex trafficking of underage girls. He killed himself in August 2019 in a federal jail, weeks after being arrested in that case.
A second grand jury in Manhattan later indicted Maxwell on charges of grooming underage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. She was convicted at trial in late 2021 and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.
