Back in August New York federal Judge Paul Engelmayer responded to the Trump Regime’s bid to unseal grand jury testimony from the case against Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell with a denial, pointing out that it was a bullshit fake-out attempt at political ass-covering during a time when fat Donald was feeling an insane amount of heat over his refusal to be more transparent on the matter and, importantly, that most of the sealed info was already public anyway.

“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,” Engelmayer wrote.

Further down he lit into Attorney General Pam Bondi and her clown car even harder, writing “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.”

Shorter: He considered doing it just to show everyone how full of shit Team Orange were about this.

Now on Tuesday, without noting literally any of this previous denial at all or that this is strictly out of statutory compliance with the newly-passed Epstein Files Transparency Act, CNN reports that Engelmayer has ordered those grand jury materials unsealed for the DOJ to make public. The judge is fulfilling his duty and commitment to the law accordingly. All public officials should be like him.

And all media outlets should at the very least copy and paste from their previous reporting on Engelmayer spiking that very unserious bid to unseal the docs four fucking months ago. It’s the shit that never crossed the doorframe of a courthouse, buried in FBI filing cabinets and hard drives, that will actually be BREAKING NEWS when it comes out. Not a judge rubber stamping a provision of the law – passed in the interim – now that his discretion over the matter has been removed.

Maybe The Hill is “DEVELOPING” that context to update their article they printed 49 minutes ago.