US renews push to unseal Epstein, Maxwell grand jury materials

Patricia Hurtado and Miles J. Herszenhorn, Bloomberg News on Nov 24, 2025

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NEW YORK — The Justice Department again asked federal judges to unseal grand jury material from the criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, citing the recently enacted law on Epstein documents.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday filed requests with a pair of New York judges overseeing the Epstein and Maxwell cases who in August rejected DOJ requests to release the grand materials. Late last week, the government also asked a judge in Florida to unseal grand jury transcripts and exhibits from an earlier federal criminal investigation there.

Grand jury proceedings are covered by strict secrecy laws. But the Justice Department under President Donald Trump has tried to win exceptions amid criticism of the administration’s retreat this summer from an earlier pledge to release government files on Epstein to the public.

Epstein was indicted on sex-trafficking charges by a New York grand jury in 2019 but died by suicide before he could stand trial. Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, was convicted on similar charges in December 2021 and is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence. An earlier Florida case resulted in a controversial 2008 plea bargain deal with state prosecutors that saw Epstein serve only about a year in prison, and allowed him to leave the jail to work from his office.

Trump signed legislation this month to compel DOJ to release its files on Epstein after spending months trying to block it. The legislation, which passed by Congress almost unanimously, requires the release of all files and records, including investigations, flight logs, travel records, immunity deals, internal DOJ communications, and all records related to Epstein’s 2019 death in prison. But it is still unclear how and when those files may be released.

The Manhattan judges who previously rejected the administration’s requests to make the grand jury materials public suggested in their August rulings that the moves were aimed at diverting attention from the far larger volume of Epstein-related material held by the Justice Department and not subject to grand jury secrecy rules.

U.S. District Judge Richard Berman, who presided over the New York Epstein case, said in August that the Justice Department is the “logical party” to disclose information about the disgraced financier.

Similarly, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer, reviewing the request in Maxwell’s case, said that though the government “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. There is no ‘there’ there.”

Late Monday, Engelmayer said the government was again asking for the grand jury material in Maxwell’s case be unsealed without consulting victims. He ordered the government to notify all victims and set a Dec. 3 deadline for any victims who wish to be heard as well as Maxwell to file a submission on her position. The government was ordered to file its response by Dec. 10.

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