Epstein grand jury transcripts sought by Trump DOJ may do little to quell the controversy: docs

Yahoo

31-07-2025

The grand jury transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein's and Ghislaine Maxwell's criminal cases — which the Trump administration is trying to get unsealed in a bid to satisfy demands for more transparency — contain testimony from just two law enforcement witnesses that may do little to answer questions surrounding President Donald Trump's role in the sordid saga.
Papers filed by the Justice Department in Manhattan Federal Court just before midnight Tuesday revealed that the only people who testified before the grand juries that indicted Epstein and Maxwell were members of law enforcement.
An unnamed FBI agent summarized investigative findings to Epstein's grand jury. The same agent testified before Maxwell's, in addition to an unnamed NYPD officer assigned to the FBI's child exploitation and human trafficking task force. Both witnesses are alive and still on the job, the filings added.
Manhattan judges had asked the Trump administration to flesh out the specifics of recent requests to unseal the confidential materials at issue.
The late Tuesday filings responding to the judges' queries were signed by Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the deputy AG and Trump's former personal lawyer Todd Blanche. The names of the prosecutors who handled the Epstein and Maxwell cases were notably absent, including that of Maurene Comey, whom the Trump administration abruptly fired without reason this month.
Trump has encountered sustained scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, which has intensified following exposés in The Wall Street Journal reporting that his name featured multiple times in nonpublic Epstein files and that he wrote a cryptic message to Epstein on the financier's 50th birthday. His top law enforcement officials have similarly faced backlash for backtracking on promises to blow the lid off the well-connected wealth manager's enablers.
As the scandal continued to grow, the Justice Department pressed judges to make the normally sealed grand jury transcripts public.
'(T)here is undoubtedly a clearly expressed interest from the public in Jeffrey Epstein's and Ghislaine Maxwell's crimes. Beyond that, there is abundant public interest in the investigative work conducted by the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into those crimes,' the late-night filing read.
But Tuesday's disclosure of what's contained within the transcripts raises questions about whether it will quell the public's demands for more information.
Those demands have primarily centered around powerful people who may have participated in Epstein's abuse, how the Coney Island native who never attended university made his millions, and his August 2019 death in a jail cell at the now-shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, which was officially ruled a suicide.
Tuesday's filings noted the grand jury testimony largely covered accounts that were publicly shared by victims at Maxwell's trial and in related civil lawsuits, suggesting little, if anything, will be new.
The filings said government lawyers had not contacted victims when they first made the request, which Manhattan Federal Judges Paul Engelmayer and Richard Berman asked about, but had since provided notice to all but one, whom they had been unable to reach.
The filings also said the Justice Department would propose redacting certain information related to victims and 'parties who neither have been charged or alleged to be involved in the crimes with which Epstein and Maxwell were charged.'
In an accompanying sealed filing, the Justice Department listed victims whose experiences with Epstein and Maxwell were conveyed to grand jurors by the law enforcement officers and who among them testified at Maxwell's trial in late 2021. Four women took the stand against Maxwell: Jane and Kate, which are pseudonyms; Annie Farmer, and Carolyn Andriano.
Tuesday's filings noted that some victims are now dead, without specifying who. Andriano died of an overdose in 2023. In devastating testimony at Maxwell's trial, she described the British heiress groping her when she was 14, grooming her to be repeatedly sexually abused by Epstein, and taking a keen interest in her history of being raped and sexually abused as a small child. She told the jury she had become addicted to pain medication and cocaine during the abuse.
Another woman who accused Epstein of abusing her, Leigh Skye Patrick, died of a drug overdose in 2017, at the age of 29.
In April of this year, one of Epstein and Maxwell's most vocal accusers, Virginia Giuffre, died by suicide. A teenage Giuffre appeared in a now-infamous photo with Prince Andrew and Maxwell that has come to symbolize the Epstein saga, showing the British royal, who attended Oxford with Maxwell, with his hand around Giuffre's waist and Maxwell smiling in the background. Prince Andrew settled a lawsuit with Giuffre in January 2022 for reportedly in the millions.
Giuffre didn't take the stand at Maxwell's trial. Still, jurors heard from Epstein's former house manager, Juan Alessi, about Maxwell poaching her from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where she had a summer job as a locker room attendant, and an attorney read her victim impact statement at Maxwell's sentencing.
Trump on Wednesday provided a new explanation for his and Epstein's falling-out after a 15-year friendship, claiming it was because Epstein 'stole' Giuffre from him.
Amid the renewed interest in Epstein, his convicted madame, Maxwell, is trying to persuade the Supreme Court to review her conviction and is lobbying to get out of prison. She was convicted of sex trafficking Epstein's victims, including a minor, in December 2021 and is serving out a 20-year sentence in Tallahassee, Fla.
Last week, the former British socialite was granted limited immunity in a set of interviews with Blanche. Separately, the GOP-led House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed her to testify next month.
Asked about the possibility he'll pardon Maxwell, Trump hasn't said what he would do if asked, only that he has the power to do so.
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