Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York granted the DOJ’s request to unseal the grand jury records in Ghislaine Maxwell’s case due to the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The decision comes a few days after a Florida judge allowed the release of grand jury transcripts from Jeffrey Epstein’s trial.
“The Court thus holds that, in passing the Act, Congress overrode Rule 6(e), in the very limited context of the Maxwell and Epstein grand jury materials,” wrote Engelmayer. “As to other grand juries, the secrecy of testimony, exhibits, and any other materials remains the rule, subject to the limited exceptions set out in Rule 6(e).”
Rule 6(e) covers the recording and disclosure of grand jury proceedings.
Engelmayer noted that the Act does not refer to grand jury materials, but agreed with the DOJ that it “textually covers the grand jury materials in this case” for three reasons:
The documents will comply with privacy, which means redactions.
Like with the Epstein material, I wonder how many blacked-out pages we will get.
Englemayer denied the DOJ’s request in August because the documents show nothing new, and Maxwell is appealing her conviction.
The judge found the request did not meet the “special circumstances” requirement.
“It consists of garden-variety summary testimony by two law enforcement agents,” Englemayer wrote in his August decision. “And the information it contains is already almost entirely a matter of longstanding public record, principally as a result of live testimony by percipient witnesses at the 2021 Maxwell trial.”
Englemayer also did not see the release a matter of “significant hostorical or public interest” for the same reason.
“Because the secondhand testimony at issue here is redundant of the public-record trial testimony of firsthand witnesses, and thus is not of significant historical or public interest, there is arguably no charter for even undertaking the In re Craig inquiry,” wrote Englemayer.
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