A federal judge has determined that the Department of Justice is authorized to carry out the public release of investigative materials from the sex-trafficking case against Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime confidant of Jeffrey Epstein.
Judge Paul A. Engelmayer issued the ruling after the DOJ formally requested in November to make public grand jury transcripts and exhibits from the cases of both Maxwell and Epstein. This request could lead to the publication of hundreds or thousands of previously unreleased documents.
The court's ruling, which follows the recent passage of the Transparency Act, means these records could be released within a 10-day window. The legislation mandates the DOJ to provide pertaining to Epstein records in a digitally searchable form by a specified date in December.
Engelmayer is the latest jurist to permit the Justice Department to release previously secret Epstein court records. Recently, a judge in Florida approved a similar request to release transcripts from an abandoned federal grand jury investigation into Epstein from the early 2000s.
A separate request concerning records from Epstein's 2019 criminal case remains pending.
The Justice Department has stated that the U.S. Congress aimed for this disclosure when it passed the Transparency Act. The latest request dramatically enlarged the scope of files slated for release to include 18 categories of investigative materials during the wide-ranging sex-trafficking investigation.
These materials are reported to include items such as:
Jeffrey Epstein, a financier, was arrested in July 2019 on federal charges. He was discovered deceased in a federal jail cell a month later, with his death ruled a suicide. Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty of sex-trafficking charges in December 2021 and is currently serving a two-decade sentence.
The federal authorities has indicated it is consulting victims and their attorneys and plans to redact records to protect survivors' identities and prevent the dissemination of explicit imagery.
Tens of thousands of pages of records related to Epstein and Maxwell have previously been made public through various means, including civil cases, official releases, and FOIA requests.
Much of the evidence the DOJ now intends to disclose stems from reports, photographs, videos gathered by police in Florida and the federal prosecutor's office there, both of which looked into Epstein in the mid-2000s.
That federal probe concluded in 2008 with a confidential deal that allowed Epstein to avoid federal charges by pleading guilty to a state prostitution charge. He served 13 months in a work-release program.
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