The justice department has renewed its request to unseal grand jury materials from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation that led to the disgraced financier’s federal indictment on sex-trafficking charges in 2019.
The submission, signed by US attorney Jay Clayton for the southern district in New York, says that Congress made clear in approving the release of investigative materials last week that the court records should be released.
Clayton asked in the filing to Manhattan federal court that the release of the materials should be done promptly because lawmakers gave a 30 day window after Donald Trump signed the measure into law last week.
The justice department said the congressional action overrode existing law in a way that permits the unsealing of the grand jury records.
But Judge Richard Berman denied a prior Trump administration request to make the grand jury transcripts public, citing a “significant and compelling reason” to deny the request.
Berman said in August that 70 pages of grand jury transcripts and exhibits including a PowerPoint presentation, four pages of call logs and letters from victims and their attorneys, pale in comparison to what documents the government already has on Epstein.
In that ruling, Berman wrote that “the government’s 100,000 pages of Epstein files and materials dwarf the 70 odd pages of Epstein grand jury materials” and that the request appeared a “diversion” from releasing documents in its possession.
The grand jury materials largely consist of the testimony of an FBI agent, the sole witness in the grand jury proceedings, “who had no direct knowledge of the facts of the case and whose testimony was mostly hearsay”.
But Berman said the compelling reason to keep the documents under seal was the “possible threats to victims’ safety and privacy”.
A similar request to unseal grand jury testimony relating to the prosecution of Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was also rejected. Manhattan federal court judge Paul Engelmayer wrote that the government’s request to unseal “implies that the grand jury materials are an untapped mine lode of undisclosed information about Epstein or Maxwell or confederates, they definitively are not that”.
Still, Clayton’s request comes soon after he was assigned to investigate Epstein’s relationship to prominent Democrats and four months after Maurene Comey, one of the lead prosecutors on the cases against Epstein and Maxwell, was fired soon before deputy attorney general Todd Blanche travelled to Florida to interview Maxwell.
Asked last week how that the New York Epstein-Democrat investigation could affect the release of Epstein files in the government’s possession, Attorney General Pam Bondi said: “We’re not going to say anything else on that because now it is a pending investigation in the southern district of New York.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
