Judge moves to unseal Maxwell grand jury records
A Manhattan federal judge on Tuesday opened the door to the public release of grand jury materials from the case against Ghislaine Maxwell.
Judge Paul A. Engelmayer agreed to the government’s request to make public a large set of records from the Maxwell case – a cache of transcripts, exhibits, and related materials that could run into the hundreds of thousands of pages and has never been released before. The move follows a similar decision last week by a federal judge in Florida, who allowed the release of grand jury records from an earlier, abandoned investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime confidante, was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking a minor and related charges and is serving a 20-year sentence.
Both Engelmayer and Judge Richard M. Berman, who is still weighing a parallel motion involving Epstein’s 2019 federal case in which he was charged with sex trafficking of minors, had rejected similar bids earlier this year under the traditional rules of grand jury secrecy. Prosecutors now contend that Congress meant to loosen those constraints for Epstein-related materials.
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Attorney General Pam Bondi, who brought the renewed requests, had urged the courts to move quickly ahead of the law’s mid-December deadline.
The renewed effort to pry open these archives stems from the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Congress passed with bipartisan support. The measure orders the department to release its Epstein-related files by December 19 and limits the kinds of information that can remain under seal. President Donald Trump signed the bill into law last month.
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