Judge Denies Motion to Unseal

The Trump administration appears to have hit another dead end in its desperate efforts to provide some semblance of closure in the years-long saga of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York denied the Justice Department’s order to unseal grand jury records related to the prosecution of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence on sex trafficking charges. Not only that, Engelmayer blasted the very premise of the motion, suggesting in blunt terms that Trump and his allies in government wanted the files published not in the interest of actual disclosure but as a stunt meant to silence any further questions about the case.

Calling the government’s arguments for moving to unseal the records “disingenuous,” Engelmayer concluded: “A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion — aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such.” He would therefore not permit the “extraordinary step” of allowing the grand jury records, which are supposed to be kept secret to protect the integrity of the process, and may only be released under rare, highly specific circumstances.

“Granting the Government’s motion would bloat the ‘special circumstances’ doctrine, which to date has warranted disclosure in only a tiny number of cases, all involving unique testimony by firsthand witnesses to events of obvious public or historical moment,” Engelmayer noted in his 31-page decision, also remarking that the materials are “redundant of the evidence at Maxwell’s trial.” In one notable instance of grand jury files being unsealed, the proceedings in which jurors decided that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, were made public to address accusations of racial bias.

The Trump administration has been looking for ways to placate a conspiracist MAGA base that believed the White House was working toward the publication of an Epstein “client list” of powerful elites whom he potentially blackmailed with information about their sexual activities with underage girls he trafficked to them. (This view has persisted despite the existence of the “list” being a matter of wild and unfounded speculation.) The same voters have also long expected bombshell revelations about Epstein’s death in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial in 2019, which was ruled a suicide.

But last month, the Justice Department and FBI stunned right-wing Epstein truthers with a short memo declaring that there was no evidence of a client list, nor that Epstein was murdered as part of a massive cover-up. These claims were all the more shocking after Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed to have an Epstein client list on her desk in February and then distributed binders of documents labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to Trumpworld social media influencers. Conspiracy theorists were furious when these turned out to be documents that were already in the public domain, including Epstein’s address book.

The dismissive July memo and Trump’s own subsequent attempts to brush aside inquiries about Epstein in press conferences caused an even bigger uproar on the right, with many MAGA loyalists calling for Bondi’s head and even criticizing the president for reneging on a campaign promise. Trump’s spin on the Esptein scandal as a Democrat-manufactured “hoax” (as he lashed out at his own followers for continuing to give it oxygen) gained little traction. The story only drew more attention to Trump’s long, well-documented relationship with Epstein; The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles with new details about their close association. It meanwhile came out that Bondi had informed Trump in May — contrary to his denials — that he is named in FBI files related to Epstein. (Inclusion in these documents is not itself an indication of wrongdoing.)

The president continued to make matters worse for himself with bizarre, self-incriminating answers to reporters, as when he stated that he broke off contact with Epstein because the latter was poaching women who worked at the Mar-a-Lago spa, and said that one of the employees he “stole” was Virginia Giuffre, a prominent Epstein accuser who died by suicide in April.

Since then, the administration seems to have taken interest in Maxwell as a potential solution to the ongoing scrutiny of Trump’s links to Epstein and the failure to bring more prosecutions in the case. In late July, the government abruptly transferred Maxwell to a minimum-security, women-only federal prison camp in Texas where most inmates are serving time for nonviolent and white-collar crimes. During hours of interviews Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche the same month, she reportedly said she had never witnessed any concerning behavior from Trump. Maxwell has appealed her conviction to the Supreme Court and offered to testify before Congress under certain conditions, including formal immunity. Trump has not ruled out a pardon for her.

Even as the administration seeks a viable endgame strategy through this notorious trafficker, right-wingers did what they could to accuse Democrats of obstructing justice. Chaya Raichik, who runs the anti-LGBTQ account “Libs of TikTok” on X, posted there that “Obama appointed U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer has DENIED the Trump admin request to unseal the grand jury documents against Ghislaine Maxwell.” (As one of the influencers embarrassed in the “Epstein Files: Phase 1” incident, Raichick has largely avoided commenting on Epstein developments since.) An anonymous MAGA conspiracy theorist also pointed out on X that Engelmayer is an Obama appointee, writing, “What does that tell you?”

Most debate over Engelmayer’s decision, however, was overshadowed by the news that Trump would deploy the National Guard to Washington, D.C., supposedly to deal with rampant crime — even though violent crime in the city has fallen to its lowest rate since before the pandemic. The president’s critics on social media called this extreme measure yet another “distraction” from a president who has been trying to shift focus away from Epstein for more than a month.