Is Pam Bondi Trying to Use the Courts to Justify Withholding Epstein Files?

Trump's Justice Department is re-asking the courts to release Epstein and Maxwell grand jury testimony pursuant to the new Transparency Act, but is it smoke and mirrors? Yes. The answer is yes.

Greetings, and welcome to all the new subscribers! I wanted to draw your attention to a small but not insignificant matter in the courts regarding the release of Epstein materials.

This past July, Todd Blanche filed motions with the court to release banal transcripts of one FBI agent’s grand jury testimony from the 2019 Epstein sex trafficking case. That move by the DOJ came just days after the explosive Wall Street Journal report about Donald’s drawing of a naked young girl in the “birthday book”. It seemed to me that the DOJ was trying to seem as though they were being transparent by asking the court to release some files when they knew the court would likely say no.

The court called them out for it, too.

Judge Berman in New York responded to that July request in August, saying that a “significant and compelling reason” to deny the request and keep the transcripts sealed was that information contained in the transcripts “pales in comparison” to investigative information and materials already in the Justice Department’s possession.

PBS reported at the time: Berman wrote that the government’s 100,000 pages of Epstein files and materials “dwarf the 70 odd pages of Epstein grand jury materials” and that the grand jury testimony “is merely a hearsay snippet of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged conduct.”

Now that the heat is back on and Pamela Jo has until December 19th to release the hundreds of thousands of pages pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the DOJ has gone back to the court to ask for the documents judges denied releasing in July.

My first thought was that this new request is an attempt to pass off their efforts as the “release of the Epstein files” as judge Berman said when asked the first time. And as it turns out, an Epstein survivor named Annie Farmer has the same concerns. Her lawyers wrote in a public letter to the court:

Ms. Farmer therefore respectfully requests that any decision as to the instant motions make abundantly clear that the Court’s ruling does not affect the Department of Justice’s ability to release documents subject to the Transparency Act. For the avoidance of doubt, this would mean that nothing in the Court’s rulings affect the Department of Justice’s ability to release other materials, including those contained in the “more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence” in the Government’s possession.

That the Government styled its motions as ones to, in part, “Modify Protective Order,” reinforces Ms. Farmer’s concern that the Government will use orders issued by the Court as a public excuse to continue to withhold crucial information.

I’ll be watching how the government responds on the deadline to release the files December 19th.

~AG