NEW YORK – Jeffrey Epstein ‘s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, desires to maintain grand jury information secret within the intercourse trafficking case that despatched her to jail, her attorneys stated Tuesday as prosecutors continued urging a courtroom to launch a few of these information within the felony case-turned-political fireball.
Maxwell hasn’t seen the fabric herself, her attorneys stated — the grand jury course of is carried out behind closed doorways. However she opposes unsealing what her attorneys described as doubtlessly “hearsay-laden” transcripts of grand jury testimony, which was given in secret and with out her attorneys there to problem it.
“No matter curiosity the general public might have in Epstein, that curiosity can’t justify a broad intrusion into grand jury secrecy in a case the place the defendant is alive, her authorized choices are viable and her due course of rights stay,” attorneys David O. Markus and Melissa Madrigal wrote.
A message searching for remark from prosecutors was not instantly returned. Authorities attorneys have been making an attempt to quell a clamor for transparency by seeking the transcripts’ release — although the federal government additionally says the general public already is aware of a lot of what’s within the paperwork.
A lot of the data “was made publicly out there at trial or has in any other case been publicly reported by way of the general public statements of victims and witnesses,” prosecutors wrote in courtroom papers Monday. They famous that the disclosures excluded some victims’ and witnesses’ names.
Prosecutors had additionally said last week that a few of what the grand jurors heard finally got here out at Maxwell’s 2021 trial and in varied victims’ lawsuits. There have been solely two grand jury witnesses, each of them regulation enforcement officers, prosecutors stated.
Prosecutors made clear Monday that they’re searching for to unseal solely the transcripts of grand jury witnesses’ testimony, not the displays that accompanied it. However they’re additionally working to parse how a lot of the displays additionally grew to become public report over time.
Whereas prosecutors have sought to mood expectations about any new revelations from the grand jury proceedings, they aren’t proposing to launch a cache of other information the federal government collected whereas trying into Epstein.
The submitting aimed to help their request to release the usually secret records amid a public clamor for more transparency in regards to the investigation into Epstein, six years after the financier died in jail. Maxwell, his former girlfriend, was later convicted of serving to him prey on underage women.
The transcript face-off comes six years after authorities stated Epstein killed himself whereas awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges and 4 years after Maxwell was convicted.
A few of President Donald Trump’s allies spent years suggesting there was more to the Epstein saga than met the attention and calling for extra disclosures. A number of received highly effective positions in Trump’s Justice Division — after which confronted backlash after it abruptly announced that nothing more would be released and {that a} long-rumored Epstein “shopper checklist” doesn’t exist.
After making an attempt unsuccessfully to change the subject and denigrating his own supporters for staying concerned about Epstein, the Republican president advised Legal professional Basic Pam Bondi to ask courts to unseal the grand jury transcripts within the case.
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