Washington — A federal decide in New York on Wednesday declined the federal authorities’s request to unseal grand jury materials within the case of late intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein, saying prosecutors had did not reveal that “particular circumstances” warranted their disclosure.
Choose Richard Berman of the U.S. District Courtroom for the Southern District of New York issued his ruling in a 14-page decision denying the federal government’s movement to unseal the paperwork.
Berman wrote that the grand jury materials in query consists of the testimony of only a single witness, an FBI agent “who had no direct data of the details of the case and whose testimony was principally rumour.” The paperwork the federal government was searching for to unseal included roughly 70 pages of transcripts of the agent’s two shows to the grand jury, a PowerPoint exhibit and a name log.
Berman famous that the Justice Division’s recordsdata on Epstein dwarf these stemming from the grand jury. Proceedings earlier than grand juries are sometimes stored secret.
“A major and compelling purpose to reject the Authorities’s place on this litigation is that the Authorities has already undertaken a complete investigation into the Epstein case and, not surprisingly, has assembled a ‘trove’ of Epstein paperwork, interviews, and displays. And, the Authorities dedicated that it will share its Epstein investigation supplies with the general public,” Berman wrote.
“The Authorities is the logical social gathering to make complete disclosure to the general public of the Epstein Information. By comparability, the moment grand jury movement seems to be a ‘diversion’ from the breadth and scope of the Epstein recordsdata within the Authorities’s possession,” Berman wrote, quoting a call by one other decide in New York who denied the government’s move to unseal materials within the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s co-conspirator who’s serving a 20-year sentence on sex-trafficking costs.
Berman wrote that the grand jury materials is “merely a rumour snippet of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged conduct.” He cited “attainable threats to victims’ security and privateness” as one of many components that weighed in favor of not releasing the paperwork.
CBS Information has reached out to the Justice Division for remark.
In July, the Justice Division asked the judges overseeing the Maxwell and Epstein instances to launch the grand jury materials that fashioned the idea for the federal costs towards them, a transfer that got here amid uproar over the department’s review of the so-called “Epstein recordsdata” and choice to not launch extra paperwork within the authorities’s possession.
