A federal judge in Florida has ordered the release of material from grand jury investigations into s£x offender Jeffrey Epstein from 2005 and 2007.
U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith, an appointee of President Donald Trump, on Friday wrote in a two-page order that the new law requiring the department to disclose nearly all of the investigative records into Epstein held by the DOJ and the FBI “trumps” the standard regulations prohibiting the public release of grand jury material.
Smith’s order will further expand the already voluminous amount of Epstein-related documents expected to be made public in the coming weeks. Judges in Florida and New York have said the grand jury records themselves are limited and unlikely to shed new light on the evidence against Epstein, the late convicted s£x offender, and Maxwell, his onetime girlfriend, who was convicted of s£x trafficking. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence and seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump.
Smith’s order didn’t set a deadline for the release of the materials. According to the law Trump signed last month, the Justice Department must disclose the hundreds of thousands of pages of Epstein and Maxwell files by Dec. 19.
Earlier this year, three federal judges rejected requests by the department to unseal the grand jury transcripts made as part of the Trump administration’s effort to quiet growing demands by the MAGA base and others to provide greater transparency into the government files on Epstein and Maxwell.
The judges said at the time that the department’s argument about the extreme public interest in the cases didn’t override federal law requiring grand jury material to be kept secret.
Epstein d!ed by suicide in his jail cell while awaiting trial.
