The Trump administration appears to have hit yet another roadblock in its desperate attempts to find some closure to the long-running story of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York denied the Justice Department’s request Monday to release grand jury materials related to the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell, an Epstein associate currently serving a 20-year prison sentence on sex trafficking charges. The motion’s fundamental premise was also attacked by Engelmayer, who implied bluntly that Trump and his government allies wanted the files made public as a publicity stunt to stop further questions about the matter rather than for the sake of full disclosure.
Engelmayer referred to the government’s arguments for moving to unseal the records as “disingenuous,” saying that “a member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion — aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such.” Therefore, he would not support the “extraordinary step” of allowing the grand jury records, which are only allowed to be made public in very specific and rare circumstances and are intended to remain confidential in order to maintain the integrity of the proceedings.
According to Engelmayer’s 31-page decision, approving the Government’s motion would “bloat the ‘special circumstances’ doctrine, which to date has warranted disclosure in only a tiny number of cases, all involving unique testimony by firsthand witnesses to events of obvious public or historical moment.” The materials are “redundant of the evidence at Maxwell’s trial,” he added. One well-known instance of grand jury files being opened was to address allegations of racial bias in the decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the 2014 killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
The Trump administration has been making an effort to please a conspiracy-minded MAGA base that believed the White House was attempting to make public an Epstein “client list” of powerful individuals he might have blackmailed with information about their interactions with the sex-trafficked girls. This belief has persisted despite unfounded speculation regarding the list’s existence. The shocking news of Epstein’s 2019 suicide in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial had long been anticipated by the same voters.
But last month, right-wing Epstein truthers were taken aback when the FBI and Justice Department issued a brief letter asserting that there was no evidence of a client list and that Epstein’s murder was a part of a massive cover-up. When Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed in February to have an Epstein client list on her desk and gave binders of documents titled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to Trumpworld social media influencers, accusations grew more shocking—only for conspiracy theorists to discover these were already public records, such as Epstein’s address book.
The contemptuous July memo and Trump’s subsequent efforts to sidestep inquiries about Epstein during press appearances sparked a larger backlash on the right. Many MAGA members called for Bondi’s resignation and chastised the president for reneging on a campaign promise. Trump’s claim that the Epstein issue is a Democrat-created “hoax” and his criticism of his own supporters for still pursuing it failed to gain traction. The Wall Street Journal published pieces containing new details about Trump and Epstein’s close friendship, further emphasizing the history between them.
Meanwhile, it emerged that Bondi had informed Trump in May that he was on FBI records related to Epstein, despite his denials. (Inclusion in these texts does not necessarily indicate misconduct.) The president worsened matters by giving reporters odd, self-incriminating responses, such as saying he broke off contact with Epstein because the latter was robbing women from the Mar-a-Lago spa and that one of these women was Virginia Giuffre—a prominent Epstein accuser—who killed himself in April.
Since then, Maxwell has drawn the administration’s attention as a potential solution to the ongoing probe into Trump’s connections to Epstein and the lack of charges in the case. In late July, the government moved Maxwell to a minimum-security, women-only federal prison camp in Texas, where most inmates serve sentences for nonviolent, white-collar crimes. During hours of interviews that same month, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche reportedly said she had never witnessed any troubling behavior from Trump.
Maxwell has appealed her sentence to the Supreme Court and offered to appear before Congress under certain conditions, including formal immunity. Trump has not ruled out pardoning her. While right-wing figures tried to accuse Democrats of obstructing justice, the administration is using this notorious trafficker to develop a feasible endgame plan.
Chaya Raichik, the creator of the anti-LGBTQ account “Libs of TikTok” on X, wrote, “The Trump administration’s request to unseal the grand jury documents against Ghislaine Maxwell has been DENIED by Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer.” Raichik—who was embarrassed by the “Epstein Files: Phase 1” controversy—has largely avoided commenting on Epstein developments since then. “What does that tell you?” wrote an anonymous MAGA conspiracy theorist on X, noting Engelmayer’s Obama appointment.
Even though violent crime in the capital has fallen to its lowest level since before the pandemic, much of the discussion surrounding Engelmayer’s choice centered on news that Trump would deploy the National Guard to Washington, D.C., supposedly to combat widespread crime. Critics on social media described this extreme move as just another “distraction” from a leader trying to deflect criticism of Epstein for more than a month.
