A US judge on Wednesday permitted the Justice Department to make secret grand jury transcripts from sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 sex trafficking case public.
District Judge Richard M Berman reversed his earlier decision to keep the material under wraps, citing a new law that requires the government to unseal investigative material on the late financier and his longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell’s sexual abuse case.
However, the judge had previously cautioned that the 70 or so pages of grand jury materials slated for release are hardly revelatory, since the rest of the grand jury presentation that consisted of a PowerPoint slideshow and a call log will continue to remain sealed.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, a different Manhattan federal judge had ordered the release of records from Maxwell’s 2021 sex trafficking case, while another judge in Florida last week approved the unsealing of transcripts from an abandoned Epstein federal grand jury investigation in the 2000s.
Questions about the Epstein files have haunted the first year of US President Donald Trump’s second term, especially in wake of reports of his alleged friendship with Epstein, which the President denies.
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Public pressure to release the files intensified after Trump reneged on a campaign promise to release them. His administration then released some material, most of it already in the public domain, disappointing critics and some allies.
The Justice Department asked the judges to lift secrecy orders after the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump last month, created a narrow exception to rules that normally keep grand jury proceedings confidential.
The law requires that the Justice Department disclose Epstein-related records to the public by December 19.
Epstein, a millionaire money manager known for socialising with celebrities, politicians, billionaires and the academic elite, killed himself in jail a month after his 2019 arrest.
Maxwell was convicted in 2021 by a federal jury of sex trafficking for helping recruit some of Epstein’s underage victims and participating in some of the abuse. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
In court filings, the Justice Department informed Judge Berman that the only witness to testify before the Epstein grand jury was an FBI agent who, the judge noted, “had no direct knowledge of the facts of the case and whose testimony was mostly hearsay”.
The agent testified over two days, on June 18, 2019, and July 2, 2019, with the July 2 session ending with grand jurors voting to indict Epstein.
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