Ghislaine Maxwell US judge rejects request to release grand jury papers

A US judge yesterday dismissed the Trump administration's request to unseal grand jury transcripts of interviews with witnesses in the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker and associate of Jeffrey Epstein.

- Edward Helmore

Dismissing the request as a "diversion", the district judge Paul Engelmayer wrote that the pre-indictment transcripts could not be released publicly, as Donald Trump's government had pushed for, because it would risk "unravelling the foundations of secrecy upon which the grand jury is premised".

While Engelmayer said that releasing the transcripts would jeopardize the confidence of people called to testify before grand juries, he also made it a point to write that the transcripts were "redundant of the evidence at Maxwell's trial".

Engelmayer said the government did not identify information of consequence in the record that was not already public in its request to release the Maxwell case's grand jury testimony.

The observation raised questions about whether the Trump administration meant to substantially address bipartisan calls for transparency in Epstein's case through its push for the transcripts' release.