Jeffrey Epstein in 2004.
Rick Friedman | Corbis Information | Getty Photos
A federal choose on Wednesday denied a request by the Trump administration to unseal the transcripts of grand jury proceedings associated to a felony investigation of intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein in Florida within the mid-2000s.
The ruling doesn’t have an effect on two different pending requests by the Division of Justice that search to acquire transcripts of grand jury proceedings associated to later federal investigations of Epstein and his confederate, Ghislaine Maxwell, in New York.
These separate proceedings led to felony indictments of them in 2019 and 2020, respectively, in U.S. District Courtroom in Manhattan.
The Trump administration filed petitions to unseal transcripts of the grand jury continuing associated to Epstein and Maxwell final week.
The transfer adopted days of criticism of President Donald Trump and Legal professional Basic Pam Bondi over the DOJ’s determination to withhold from the general public investigative proof about Epstein regardless of earlier guarantees it could be launched.
The DOJ’s petition in U.S. District Courtroom in West Palm Seashore, Florida, sought to unseal transcripts of two grand juries convened in that court docket in 2005 and 2007.
The DOJ argued that disclosure of the transcripts — which usually are stored secret — was correct as a result of there was a “robust public curiosity within the historic investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
The division additionally argued that “lots of the rationales supporting grand jury secrecy” beneath federal felony process guidelines “not apply” as a result of Epstein died in 2019.
Choose Robin Rosenberg, in her denial of that petition, mentioned that an unrelated ruling in 2020 by the eleventh U.S. Circuit Courtroom of Appeals held {that a} district court docket doesn’t have the ability to unseal grand jury data in cases not lined by the felony process rule. The circuit handles appeals arising from federal district courts in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia.
Neither argument superior by the DOJ complies with that exception to the rule, Rosenberg wrote in her determination Wednesday.
“Eleventh Circuit regulation doesn’t allow this Courtroom to grant the Authorities’s request; the Courtroom’s palms are tied — some extent the Authorities concedes,” the choose wrote.
Nonetheless, Rosenberg famous that the DOJ’s requested exception to grand jury secrecy on the grounds of a robust public curiosity is acknowledged in simply two federal appellate circuits: the 2nd and the seventh.
The 2nd Circuit U.S. Courtroom of Appeals handles circumstances that come up from Manhattan federal court docket, the place the opposite grand jury probes of Epstein and Maxwell have been carried out.
The DOJ had requested Rosenberg to switch its petition to her in Florida to Manhattan federal court docket, the place the 2nd Circuit’s steerage on grand jury disclosures would apply.
However Rosenberg on Wednesday rejected that request, saying that the DOJ had not met the requirements for such a switch of the petition.
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