A US judge said on Wednesday that the Trump administration is in a better position than federal courts to release materials that would satisfy public curiosity about the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking case.
In rejecting the justice department's bid to unseal records from the grand jury that indicted Epstein in 2019, Manhattan-based US district judge Richard Berman wrote that the 70-odd pages of materials the grand jury saw paled in comparison to the 100,000 pages the government has from its Epstein investigation but is not releasing. The judge said the bid to persuade him to unseal the records was an apparent distraction from the justice department's decision in July not to release its files and directly cited another judge's decision earlier this month not to release similar materials from the grand jury that indicted Epstein's longtime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.
The instant grand jury motion appears to be a 'diversion' from the breadth and scope of the Epstein files in the government's possession, Berman wrote.