SDNY Circuit Judge Paul Engelmayer on Monday did what the Trump Regime had hoped he would do and denied their bid to unseal grand jury testimony from the case against Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Engelmayer, an Obama appointee, did however slip in some trolling, calling the kabuki effort akin to what the reich did with those MAGA influencers back in February.
Wrote Engelmayer: “The evidence put before the Maxwell grand juries is today, with only very minor exceptions, a matter of public record. The Government admitted as much in response to the Court’s order: ‘The enclosed, annotated transcripts show that much of the information provided during the course of the grand jury testimony – with the exception of the identities of certain witnesses – was made publicly available at [Maxwell’s] trial or has otherwise been publicly reported through the public statements of victims and witnesses.’ And because the Government proposes to redact the witnesses’ identities, the exception it noted does not reflect information that the public would learn were the grand jury transcripts unsealed. The Court’s review confirmed that unsealing the grand jury materials would not reveal new information of any consequence,” emphasis added.
Continued, with more emphasis added: “In response to the Court’s order, the Government supplied the Court with a binder highlighting any information that the Government had been unable to determine is public. Only scattered words, clauses, and occasional sentences are highlighted. These items are few and far between. The highlighted snippets supply, at most, tertiary details about the same conduct that was the focus of Maxwell’s month-long trial. The same is so for the exhibits put before the grand juries. Save inconsequential portions of a few exhibits, these were received in evidence at Maxwell’s trial. Some were reproduced in the Maxwell indictments.”
“A member of the public familiar with the Maxwell trial record who reviewed the grand jury materials that the Government proposes to unseal would thus learn next to nothing new. The materials do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor. They do not discuss or identify any client of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s,” Engelmayer wrote.
Further down is by far the most savage dickpunch:
“The one colorable argument under that doctrine for unsealing in this case, in fact, is that doing so would expose as disingenuous the Government’s public explanations for moving to unseal. A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at “transparency” but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such.”
TLDR: Sur-fucking-prise that, not only did Pam Bondi and the rest of her team know this was going to fail, their backup plan in case it did not fail was in the content of these documents.