Trump pushes for release of Epstein, Maxwell grand jury testimony
In late-night court filings on Tuesday, U.S. federal prosecutors said unsealing the materials would be appropriate given the "abundant public interest" in the case of Epstein, the late financier, and Maxwell, an imprisoned British socialite.
The Republican Trump had promised to make public Epstein-related files if reelected and accused Democrats of covering up the truth. But this month the Department of Justice said a previously touted Epstein client list did not in fact exist, angering Trump's supporters.
DOJ first sought court permission on July 18 to make public transcripts of the confidential testimony given by witnesses years ago in the two cases, but Manhattan-based U.S. District Judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer asked the government to flesh out the legal bases for the requests.
Trump has faced pressure to make public documents from the federal investigations into Epstein, who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, and his longtime girlfriend Maxwell, who was convicted of sex trafficking in 2021.
Even if one or both of the judges allow the transcripts to be made public, it is not clear whether the public would learn anything new or noteworthy.
In the filings, prosecutors said the only witness at Epstein's grand jury was an FBI agent. That same agent and a New York City Police Department detective were the only witnesses at Maxwell's grand jury, prosecutors said.
Maxwell's four-week trial in 2021 included public testimony from alleged sex trafficking victims, associates of Epstein and Maxwell, and law enforcement officers.
She is now serving a 20-year prison sentence in Florida and is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn her conviction. She had pleaded not guilty.
The unsealing requests came after Trump earlier this month asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the release of grand jury transcripts. The president did so after the Justice Department said it concluded that Epstein died by suicide and that there was no incriminating list of his clients.
The Justice Department's announcement angered some of Trump's conservative supporters who believe the government is covering up Epstein's ties to the rich and powerful and that the financier was murdered in jail.
Grand juries are convened by prosecutors and meet in secret to hear witness testimony and decide whether to indict people suspected of crimes. Records of their proceedings usually remain sealed. There are only limited circumstances under which such transcripts can be disclosed.
The transcripts would not represent all previously unreleased material in the government's possession. Investigators and prosecutors may pursue leads that they cannot substantiate or interview potential witnesses whom they do not ultimately call to testify before a grand jury.
U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg in Florida last week denied the administration's request to unseal records from grand jury probes in 2005 and 2007 in that state into Epstein. The judge said the request did not fall into any of the limited exceptions that may allow for the release of such material.
Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a prostitution charge brought under Florida law and was given a 13-month sentence in a deal with prosecutors now widely regarded as too lenient.
Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal lawyer, last week met with Maxwell to see if she had any information about others who had committed crimes. Maxwell's lawyer David Markus and Blanche have not provided detailed accounts of their discussions.
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The Independent
34 minutes ago
- The Independent
Brutal arrest of Black student in Florida shows benefits of recording police from new vantage point
A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles. William McNeil Jr. captured his February traffic stop on his cellphone camera, which was mounted above his dashboard. It offered a unique view, providing the only clear footage of the violence by officers, including punches to his head that can't clearly be seen in officer body camera footage released by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. Since McNeil had the foresight to record the encounter from inside the vehicle, 'we got to see firsthand and hear firsthand and put it all in context what driving while Black is in America,' said civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of several lawyers advising McNeil. 'All the young people should be recording these interactions with law enforcement," Crump said. Because what it tells us, just like with George Floyd, if we don't record the video, we can see what they put in the police report with George Floyd before they realized the video existed.' McNeil was pulled over that day because officers said his headlights should have been on due to bad weather, his lawyers said. His camera shows him asking the officers what he did wrong. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sat in the driver's seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, a police report states. The incident reports don't describe the officer punching McNeil in the head. The officer, who pulled McNeil over and then struck him, described the force this way in his report: 'Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground.' But after McNeil posted his video online last month and it went viral, the sheriff's office launched an internal investigation, which is ongoing. A sheriff's office spokesperson declined to comment about the case this week, citing pending litigation, though no lawsuit has been filed over the arrest. McNeil said the ordeal left him traumatized, with a brain injury, a broken tooth and several stiches in his lip. His attorneys accused the sheriff's office of trying to cover up what really happened. 'On Feb. 19, 2025, Americans saw what America is,' said another of McNeil's lawyers, Harry Daniels. 'We saw injustice. You saw abuse of police power. But most importantly we saw a young man that had a temperament to control himself in the face of brutality.' The traffic stop, he said, was not only racially motivated but 'it was unlawful, and everything that stemmed from that stop was unlawful." McNeil is hardly the first Black motorist to record video during a traffic stop that turned violent — Philando Castile 's girlfriend livestreamed the bloody aftermath of his death during a 2016 traffic stop near Minneapolis. But McNeil's arrest serves as a reminder of how cellphone video can show a different version of events than what is described in police reports, his lawyers said. Christopher Mercado, who retired as a lieutenant from the New York Police Department, agreed with McNeil's legal team's suggestion that drivers should record their police interactions and that a camera mounted inside a driver's car could offer a unique point of view. "Use technology to your advantage," said Mercado, an adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. 'There's nothing nefarious about it. It's actually a smart thing in my opinion.' Rod Brunson, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, said he thinks it's a good idea for citizens to film encounters with police — as long as doing so doesn't make the situation worse. 'I think that's a form of protection — it's safeguarding them against false claims of criminal behavior or interfering with officers, etc.,' Brunson said. Although the sheriff's office declined to speak to The Associated Press this week, Sheriff T.K. Waters has spoken publicly about McNeil's arrest since video of the encounter went viral. He pushed back against some of the allegations made by McNeil's lawyers, noting that McNeil was told more than a half-dozen times to exit the vehicle. At a news conference last month, Waters also highlighted images of a knife in McNeil's car. The officer who punched him claimed in his police report that McNeil reached toward the floor of the car, where deputies later found the knife. Crump, though, said McNeil's video shows that he 'never reaches for anything,' and a second officer wrote in his report that McNeil kept his hands up as the other officer smashed the car window. A camera inside a motorist's vehicle could make up for some shortcomings of police bodycams, which can have a narrow field of view that becomes more limited the closer an officer gets to the person being filmed, Mercado said. However, after the police murder of Floyd, some states and cities debated how and when citizens should be able to capture video of police. The Constitution guarantees the right to record police in public, but a point of contention in some states has been whether a civilian's recording might interfere with the ability of officers to do their job. In Louisiana, for example, a new law makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet (7.6 meters) of a police officer in certain situations. Waters acknowledged those limitations at a news conference last year, as he narrated video of a wild brawl between officers and a fan in the stands at EverBank Stadium during a football game last year between the universities of Georgia and Florida. The sheriff showed the officers' bodycam videos during the start of the confrontation near the top of the stadium. But when the officers subdued the suspect and were pressing against him, the bodycam footage didn't capture much, so the sheriff switched to stadium security video shot from a longer distance away. In McNeil's case, the bodycam video didn't clearly capture the punches thrown. If it had, the case would have been investigated right away, the sheriff said. For the past 20 years, Brunson has been interviewing young Black men in several U.S. cities about their encounters with law enforcement. When he first began submitting research papers for academic review, many readers didn't believe the men's stories of being brutalized by officers. ' People who live in a civil society don't expect to be treated this way by the police. For them, their police interactions are mostly pleasant, mostly cordial," Brunson said. 'So it's hard for people who don't have a tenuous relationship with the police to fathom that something like this happens,' he said. "And that's where video does play a big part because people can't deny what they see.'
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Donald Trump – peacemaker-in-chief or a global agitator?
Serving both Republican and Democratic administrations, including under the presidencies of George W Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross for decades was one of those tasked with navigating the most dangerous of diplomatic waters. It was interesting then to hear him opine last week on current US president Donald Trump's diplomatic negotiating style. 'There is a difference between producing ceasefires and pauses and ending wars,' noted Ross, speaking to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). 'The former stops fighting, the latter deals with the causes of the conflict and forges agreements that resolve the differences – or at least gets both sides to adjust their thinking and produces a modus vivendi.' READ MORE: John Swinney brands Gaza as 'genocide' for first time as Fringe show disrupted Ross's comments came in a week that saw Trump issue a deadline of '10 or 12 days' to Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire over Ukraine. This weekend, that agreement seems further away than ever after Trump said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to 'be positioned in the appropriate regions' in response to 'highly provocative' comments by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. Ross's remarks also came in a week when Washington's allies, France, the UK and Canada, broke with Trump to force a diplomatic shift on Gaza. For despite the US leader's boastful promises on bringing calm to the region – as with his claim to be able to bring peace to Russia's war with Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to office – all of Trump's peace-making promises to date have been colliding with a more complicated reality on the ground. Ukraine In short, Trump's supposed prowess on the peace-making front is not all it's cracked up to be, a point wryly made by Susan B Glasser of the New Yorker magazine a few days ago. 'Wars, it turns out, do not end magically because Trump clicks his heels and demands that they do so,' wrote Glasser in a recent column. As even the most cursory of glances across the global geo-political landscape will quickly confirm, the prevailing reality is a far cry from when Trump, in his January 20, 2025 inaugural address, proclaimed that 'we will measure our success … by the wars we end'. And 'my proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.' Despite the obvious shortcomings to date in this regard, though, America's peacemaker-in-chief – in characteristic mode – has continued to claim great success, a point he was keen to emphasise during his recent trip to Scotland. 'We have many ceasefires going on. If I weren't around, you would have six major wars going on. India would be fighting with Pakistan,' Trump insisted in one of his speeches. As Trump sees it, should that much-coveted Nobel Peace Prize come his way, then he is only too deserving of it. 'If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,' Trump said in October. Trump's ever-loyal mouthpiece, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, never misses an opportunity to remind the world that it's 'well past time' that the president received the prize. Just these past days, Leavitt, at a press briefing, listed the peace deals that the Trump administration has supposedly brokered since taking office. Thailand and Cambodia were the most recent of Trump's peacemaker bona fides. 'The two countries were engaged in a deadly conflict that had displaced more than 300,000 people until President Trump stepped in to put an end to it,' Leavitt insisted. Other conflicts cited by Leavitt included Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), India and Pakistan, and Serbia and Kosovo – all claimed to have been 'resolved' on Trump's watch. One curious outcome in at least two instances, however, was that in the cases of both Pakistan and Cambodia, no sooner were hostilities ceased than their leaders announced that they would nominate Trump for the Peace Prize. Interestingly, too, in Thailand and Cambodia's case, Trump set a 19% levy on imports from both countries, lower than the 36% they originally faced, after earlier this month he threatened to block trade deals with them unless they ended their deadly border clash. Which brings us to another significant factor that many say undermines Trump's claims to be a peacemaker and mediator and instead casts him as a global agitator – trade wars and tariffs. Last week, Trump plunged the global economy into a new round of mercantile competition after hitting dozens of US trading partners with tariffs while formalising recent deals with others, including the UK and EU. While such competition is nothing new in itself, as a Financial Times (FT) editorial on Friday pointed out, in Trump's case, they are often flagrantly politically motivated. On the one hand, Trump portrays the tariffs he has ordered on US trading partners as a simple rebalancing of global trading that is skewed against America. But as the FT points out, 'what is striking, however, is how some of the harshest new measures reflect blatantly political aims – shaped by presidential whim'. The newspaper cites the example of Canada, which has angered Trump with its own plans to recognise a Palestinian state, making it 'very hard', says Trump, to reach a trade deal. The FT also highlights India, already hit by a high tariff rate but which Washington has threatened with an additional penalty while rebuking prime minister Narendra Modi's government for 'buying Russian oil and weapons'. Trump's stance, says the FT, also appears to reflect his dislike of India's membership of the Brics bloc of emerging heavyweight markets and developing nations. During a summit of the 11 emerging economies last month, he threatened an additional 10% tariff on any countries aligning themselves with the Brics's 'anti-American policies'. More than 100 days on from Trump's 'Liberation Day' set of initial tariffs, many say a new global trading order is taking shape, one that The Economist magazine recently referred to as 'a system of imperial preference'. This, argue some analysts, only adds incendiary economic fuel to an already destabilised world, raising the risk that such trade wars might become shooting wars. Allison Carnegie is professor of political science at Columbia University and specialises in global governance and international institutions. Writing recently in the widely respected Foreign Affairs magazine, she said that Trump's trade wars are hardly without precedent and that while 'Trump may think his tariff regime will make the United States richer, safer, and stronger … history suggests it will do just the opposite'. 'In the near term, countries can benefit from wielding trade as a cudgel. But in the long term, trade wars leave almost everyone worse off,' Carnegie notes. 'When countries frequently use economic leverage to secure concessions from vulnerable partners, investment and economic growth go down. Political instability, meanwhile, goes up. States that chafe at economic coercion sometimes turn to their militaries in order to fight back. Countries that once co-operated because of commercial ties turn into competitors. Even close allies drift apart,' Carnegie noted. Few doubt the inherent difficulty in ending protracted conflicts like those in the Middle East and now in Ukraine. Both broke out during the previous administration, enabling Trump to dub them 'Biden's wars'. 'Biden will drive us into World War III, and we're closer to World War III than anybody can imagine,' said the same Trump who on Friday moved US nuclear submarines in response to a social media post by Medvedev. On his presidential campaign trail, Trump often railed against Biden and such 'endless wars' and 'forever wars' and mused that he could resolve them. 'He has made comments on all of them that this could be done quickly or easily and that there are solutions to these problems,' says Aaron David Miller, a State Department diplomat in the Clinton and George W Bush administrations – now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'And yet, he has not been successful in even identifying what I would consider to be a potentially effective strategy for managing, let alone resolving them. And therein lies the challenge,' Miller told broadcaster ABC News in a recent interview. Six months after Trump's inaugural address proclaiming that his presidency would bring 'a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable', and denouncing 'Biden's wars', the data tells a very different story. For in those six months, Trump has already launched nearly as many airstrikes on foreign nations as Biden did within four years. A huge part of this, of course, was 'Operation Midnight Hammer', when Trump decided that he would order the use of 30,000-pound weapons against Iran's nuclear sites. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), an independent international data collection monitoring group, since Trump returned to the White House, the US has carried out at least 529 bombings in more than 240 locations in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. His predecessor's administration launched 555 over its entire four years. 'Trump's preference for engagement begs the question: Does this contradict his promise to end America's wars – or are the foreign strikes how he wishes to keep that promise?' ACLED president Clionadh Raleigh said in a statement cited by The Independent last month. 'The recent airstrikes on Iran's nuclear sites have been framed as a major turning point in US foreign policy. But if you take a step back, they don't stand out – they fit,' Raleigh added. Right now, when not riling other nations through his own tariffs and trade wars, ending the fighting in Ukraine and Gaza by far poses Trump's biggest diplomatic challenge. In both cases, he has his work cut out, not least, say some, in that he has appointed the same man, his friend Steve Witkoff, as the US envoy for all three sets of peace talks, involving Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Hamas and Israel-Iran. As Max Boot recently observed in The Washington Post, this 'would test the powers of even a veteran diplomat' … and 'the task is all the more onerous given that Witkoff is a real-estate developer with no background in diplomacy'. Meanwhile, as Gaza bleeds and starves, Trump diplomatically muddles through, as was poignantly described recently by Glasser of The New Yorker. 'In a summer of horror for Gaza, it's hard to recall the unfulfilled promises of last winter, when Trump bragged, in near world-historical terms, of the 'EPIC' ceasefire that he and his team had helped broker,' wrote Glasser recently. 'Now, as Trump stands by and does close to nothing at all, what can we do but wish that he had, for once, been right?' Many critics maintain that a huge part of the problem with Trump's negotiating style is that it fluctuates depending on the current state of his personal relationships with other world leaders. As his second term progresses, Trump's priorities would seem to become more apparent by the day, startling observers and US allies alike. Already there have been calls for US intervention in Panama, Canada and as recently as May, Trump announced that he didn't rule out employing military force to seize Greenland. He has also proposed a $1 trillion US military budget for 2026 – a 13.4 % increase – and again took action to withdraw US support from the UN. Critics continue to accuse him of shaping American foreign policy determined primarily by a desire to pursue his own vendettas toward those that rebuff him and in doing so use whatever means – economic or otherwise – at his disposal. As Ross rightly pointed out, there is indeed 'a difference between producing ceasefires and pauses and ending wars'. To achieve the latter, patience and lengthy negotiations are a prerequisite, and that, as we all know by now, has never been part of the Trump playbook.
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Comedian and lifelong Dodgers fan George Lopez 'hurt' after team apparently blocked him over ICE criticism
Comedian George Lopez has claimed the Los Angeles Dodgers have blocked him on social media after criticizing the organization for a perceived lack of action over ICE raids in the city. The 64-year-old has been a vociferous opponent of ICE and has called for his beloved Dodgers to stand up more publicly in support of immigrants in the community. When tension around the raids were at their highest, however, the World Series champions came in for criticsm when singer Nezza was apparently told not to sing the national anthem in Spanish before a mid-June game against San Francisco Giants. On July 12, Lopez claimed on social media that the Dodgers - who visited Donald Trump in the White House earlier this year - blocked him over his opposition to the team, something he has now told People he finds 'hurtful'. Last month, he posted a video on social media of him dancing with the upload captioned: 'POV: You just got blocked by the Dodgers'. In a passionate post, he wrote alongside his upload: 'The Dodgers blocked me on social media for my criticism of the team, so they'll take a stand on me, but not on the treatment of the families who called Chavez Ravine Home before they decided to build a baseball stadium where they lived and where their families called home.' View this post on Instagram A post shared by George ���� Lopez (@georgelopez) Chavez Ravine was a Los Angeles neighborhood home to a largely low-income Hispanic community that was displaced to make way for Dodger Stadium to be built. The stadium eventually opened in 1962 as the Brooklyn Dodgers relocated to Los Angeles to make the ballpark their home. Lopez's July post continued: 'Also no comment from the owners (on ICE).What's happening everyday to the families of the people who are being treated like they don't belong? If anyone doesnt belong it's the Dodgers. 'Maybe since the Dodgers have stayed silient on the issue of the treatment and enforcement of ICE on the Latino Community, maybe at the next fan fest or homestand they can have ICE Agents or these bounty hunters dress up as the visiting team and during the 7th inning stretch they can remove fans, since their loyalty to the team means nothing to them.' The Dodgers, who have been offered the chance to comment by Daily Mail, have not yet spoken publicly about Lopez's claims. But the team did donate $1million in support of families of immigrants impacted by ICE raids in June. Dodgers president and CEO, Stan Kasten, said in a statement: 'What's happening in Los Angeles has reverberated among thousands upon thousands of people, and we have heard the calls for us to take a leading role on behalf of those affected. 'We believe that by committing resources and taking action, we will continue to support and uplift the communities of Greater Los Angeles.' On June 19, the Dodgers said on social media that ICE agents had been denied entry to their ballpark. Their post read: 'This morning, ICE agents came to Dodger Stadium and requested permission to access the parking lots. They were denied entry to the grounds by the organization. Tonight's game will be played as scheduled.' Lopez has made no secret of his lifelong Dodgers fandom. In a piece he wrote for ESPN in 2016, he underlined his love for the team and recalled how awestruck he felt when he went to Dodger Stadium for the first time. 'I'll never forget seeing Dodger Stadium for the first time. Little did I know that going to Dodger games would become a tradition for my family,' he wrote. 'I've gone to Dodger Stadium with regularity in the years since... My seats now are a lot better than my 75-cent ticket to the left field pavilion, but nothing is better than looking out from the seats behind home plate and imagining my grandparents both still there.' Trump welcomed the Dodgers to the White House in April to commemorate their 2024 World Series triumph.
