Judge won’t unseal Jeffrey Epstein grand jury transcripts in Florida

A federal judge on Wednesday denied a request by the Trump administration to unseal the transcripts of grand jury proceedings related to a criminal investigation of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in Florida in the mid-2000s.

The ruling does not affect two other pending requests by the Department of Justice that seek to obtain transcripts of grand jury proceedings related to later federal investigations of Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, in New York.

Those separate proceedings led to criminal indictments of them in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

The Trump administration filed petitions to unseal transcripts of the multiple grand jury proceedings last week, after days of criticism over the DOJ’s decision to withhold from the public investigative evidence about Epstein despite earlier promises it would be released.

The DOJ’s petition in U.S. District Court in West Palm Beach, Florida, sought to unseal transcripts of two grand juries convened in that court in 2005 and 2007.

The DOJ argued that disclosure of the transcripts — which are normally kept secret — was proper because there was a “strong public interest in the historical investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.

The department also argued that “many of the rationales supporting grand jury secrecy” under federal criminal procedure rules “no longer apply” because Epstein died in 2019.

Judge Robin Rosenberg, in her denial of that petition, said that an unrelated ruling in 2020 by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — which handles appeals arising from federal district courts in Florida, Alabama and Georgia — held that a district court does not have the power to unseal grand jury records in instances not covered by the criminal procedure rule.

Neither argument advanced by the DOJ complies with that exception to the rule, Rosenberg wrote in her decision Wednesday.

“Eleventh Circuit law does not permit this Court to grant the Government’s request; the Court’s hands are tied — a point the Government concedes,” the judge wrote.

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