By Jeremy Roebuck, Washington Post —
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected the Justice Department’s request to unseal grand jury transcripts from investigations of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in Florida, a setback for the Trump administration amid growing calls for transparency from the president’s base.
The department petitioned the court last week to release those closely held records from the federal grand juries, based in West Palm Beach, that investigated Epstein in 2005 and 2007. But in a 12-page opinion Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Robin L. Rosenberg said she could not legally do so under court rules governing the secrecy of those federal proceedings in Florida.
“The court’s hands are tied,” Rosenberg wrote. She noted the government had conceded as much in its original motion, which had acknowledged that the request did not fall under any of the limited exceptions allowing for grand jury disclosures. Prosecutors argued that Epstein’s 2019 death, which was ruled a suicide, invalidated the need for adherence to those rules.
The Justice Department is pursuing separate requests to release grand jury transcripts related to Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell in Manhattan, where both were charged with sex trafficking and other crimes. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 and is serving a 20-year sentence in Florida. Epstein died while awaiting trial.
The federal judges in New York overseeing the motion to release the transcripts there said that the department had not “adequately addressed” the limited factors under which grand jury material can be publicly released in that appellate district. They requested further briefing from government lawyers and input from representatives for Epstein and Maxwell as well as their victims.
Facing sustained backlash from his base, President Donald Trump last week ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the public release of the Epstein grand jury filings. The directive was the latest effort by his administration to address the growing outrage among some sectors of Trump’s base after the Justice Department concluded this month that investigators had no additional evidence implicating “any additional third parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing.”
That finding has ignited a furor among conspiracy theorists and Trump’s supporters, who had been primed for years to expect blockbuster revelations implicating high-profile accomplices based on vows from the president’s appointees to make public the FBI’s Epstein files.
