By Thérèse Boudreaux
The Center Square

The Trump administration is facing another setback in attempting to curb backlash over its chameleonic handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, with another federal judge refusing to unseal pertinent grand jury transcripts.

At the request of the president, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion on July 18 to unseal grand jury materials from United States v. Epstein and United States v. Maxwell, the latter case concerning Epstein’s close associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who aided and participated in Epstein’s sex trafficking of minor girls.

Invoking the “special circumstances” precedent, the DOJ made the request based on “extensive public interest” and the notion that the grand jury materials contain “critical pieces of an important moment in our nation’s history” that are publicly unavailable.

However, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer has denied the request to unseal grand jury records from United States v. Maxwell, ruling that the DOJ’s legal argument “fails at the threshold” because a judicial review revealed that “unsealing the grand jury materials would not reveal new information of any consequence.”

“[The] grand juries in this case were not used for investigative purposes. They did not hear testimony from any firsthand witness to any event at issue. They did not hear testimony from any victim, eyewitness, suspect, or even a records custodian. The grand juries met instead for the quotidian purpose of returning an indictment,” Engelmayer, an Obama-appointee, said Monday.

“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 definitively are not that,” he added.

The DOJ’s request for grand jury documents from United States v. Epstein was similarly denied by a federal judge in July, as The Center Square reported.

Epstein died awaiting trial in 2019, while Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence that she recently appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Interest in their crimes resurfaced after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Epstein’s alleged client list was “sitting on [her] desk,” only for the administration to backtrack and claim that no such list existed.

Engelmayer showed no sympathy for the administration’s attempt at damage control, even suggesting that the DOJ’s request “was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such.”

“Contrary to the Government’s depiction, the Maxwell grand jury testimony is not a matter of significant historical or public interest…It consists of garden-variety summary testimony by two law enforcement agents. And the information it contains is already almost entirely a matter of longstanding public record,” Engelmayer said. “Without any need to review the grand jury materials, the public can evaluate for itself the Government’s asserted bases for making this motion.”

As of Monday afternoon, the Trump administration has not responded to Engelmayer’s ruling.