A recent court filing reveals that just two witnesses testified during the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell grand jury proceedings.
When asked why the U.S. government wants to keep the grand jury trial unsealed, Attorney General Pam Bondi stated that the two witnesses were an FBI agent and a New York Police Department officer.
The Justice Department is attempting to make grand jury testimony from the Florida and New York cases against the convicted [sexual] offenders publicly available at the order of President Donald Trump.
The Southern District of Florida denied Trump’s motion, while the Southern District of New York requested additional details, such as whether the witnesses were still living, to support the decision to unseal grand jury testimony.
In his filing on Tuesday night, interim U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton stated that both witnesses are still alive and employed by their respective agencies. This raises the question of whether the judges’ decision to reveal the highly-protected grand jury testimony would reveal any shocking details in the child [sexual] trafficking case.
Bondi’s demand for additional details comes as the DOJ’s handling of the study of the Epstein files has angered many Americans.
In July, the DOJ and FBI released a memo on its findings in the case, which concluded that Epstein died by suicide, that there is no so-called “client list” of co-conspirators, and that no one else would be charged in the crimes.
British socialite and longtime Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence and is the only person serving time for the crimes.
Amid the MAGA base’s growing concerns of a cover-up, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche traveled to Florida last week to participate in two days of interviews with Maxwell. Clayton describes how one FBI agent testified in the Maxwell grand jury trial and was a witness in the Epstein grand jury hearings.
The NYPD officer, who worked on the FBI’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force, was only part of the proceedings for Maxwell’s case in SDNY. ‘Both witnesses are still alive; the FBI agent continues to be an agent with the FBI, and the Detective continues to be a Detective with the NYPD as well as a Task Force Officer,’ Clayton wrote.
The most recent filing was also signed by Bondi and Blanche. In order to determine relevancy, statute of limitations, and whether it makes sense to unseal more papers, the SDNY asked the U.S. government how long it had been since the initial cases.
‘The passage of time has not dulled the public’s interest in these cases,’ Clayton wrote in the court document. The request for more information required that the government reply by July 29 – a deadline that was narrowly hit when the filing dropped on Tuesday night. Nothing the administration has done since taking office in January has helped satiate the public’s desire for a full public account of what the FBI learned during its investigations of Epstein’s child [sexual] trafficking ring.
The grand jury testimony is only a small portion of the material the FBI obtained to support their claims against Epstein and Maxwell, even if it is made public. All but one of Epstein’s victims included in the transcripts were informed of the DOJ’s effort to have the papers made public, according to Clayton’s petition on Tuesday.
The deadline for those victims to object to the distribution of redacted versions of the transcript—which would expose their names and any other identifying information—is Tuesday.
Even if they do, Bondi will have a difficult time persuading the courts to release them to the public and others.
