(Fixes typo in paragraph 4 to read mine lode, not mine load)
By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -A U.S. judge denied on Monday the Justice Department’s bid to unseal records from the grand jury that indicted the late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell on sex trafficking charges, writing that the records did not answer lingering questions from the public about their crimes or Epstein’s death.
Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer, who reviewed the transcripts of the witness testimony heard by the grand jury and other evidence the panel saw, wrote that the government’s assertion that the materials would reveal meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes was “demonstrably false.”
“A member of the public familiar with the Maxwell trial record who reviewed the grand jury materials that the Government proposes to unseal would thus learn next to nothing new,” Engelmayer wrote.
“Insofar as the motion to unseal implies that the grand jury materials are an untapped mine lode of undisclosed information about Epstein or Maxwell or confederates, they are definitely not that,” the judge wrote.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after her 2021 conviction on sex-trafficking charges. Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. He had pleaded not guilty.
Neither the Justice Department nor a lawyer for Maxwell immediately responded to requests for comment.
President Donald Trump last month instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the release of the Epstein and Maxwell grand jury material, as he sought to quell discontent from his base of conservative supporters and congressional Democrats over his administration’s handling of documents from the cases.
Trump, a Republican, had promised to make public Epstein-related files if reelected and accused Democrats of covering up the truth. But in July, the Justice Department said a previously touted Epstein client list did not exist, angering Trump’s supporters.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Mark Porter)
