Judge denies DOJ bid to unseal grand jury material in Ghislaine Maxwell case

Politico

6 hours ago

And, the judge wrote, the only reasonable argument for unsealing the material 'is that doing so would expose as disingenuous the Government's public explanations for moving to unseal.'
Maxwell, a convicted sex offender, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding and participating in a sex trafficking ring run by her onetime boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein.
Over the past month, the Justice Department has sought to quell outrage from President Donald Trump's supporters over the administration's handling of the so-called Epstein files. In an early July memo, the department concluded that 'no further disclosure' of Epstein-related material would be warranted. But after backlash from the far right, the department took several steps to try to demonstrate that it is seeking to expose additional information about Epstein's crimes, including asking judges to unseal the grand jury transcripts and exhibits in the Epstein and Maxwell cases.
A federal judge in Florida last month rejected one of those requests. Another judge in Manhattan is currently weighing a separate request.
The Justice Department also interviewed Maxwell for two days last month and transferred her to a less restrictive prison. Both actions have outraged victims of Maxwell and Epstein, who died by suicide in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial.
The decision about the grand jury materials is, on its face, a loss for the Justice Department. But it may allow the department to place the blame for keeping the documents private on the judge. The bid to make the material public was always a longshot and, as both the judge and the government acknowledged, the files contained almost no material that would add to the public's understanding of the matter.
A spokesperson for the DOJ didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
In his decision, Engelmayer took aim not just at the department's rationale for unsealing, but also at the process by which it went about requesting it.
The judge criticized the department for failing to include in the process any of the prosecutors who handled Maxwell's 2021 trial. The members of the trial team would have been most familiar with the material. Instead, only the Justice Department's second-highest-ranking official, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who subsequently interviewed Maxwell, signed the motion seeking to release the records.
Days before the department filed the request to unseal the material, it fired Maurene Comey, one of the last two prosecutors working at the Justice Department who handled the Epstein or Maxwell investigations.
And the judge faulted the DOJ for failing to notify victims of Maxwell or Epstein in advance of the request, a factor that many victims have also criticized in letters to the court.
The judge noted that although many victims support the effort to unseal the material, their position was based on the 'understandable but mistaken belief that these materials would reveal new information.'