Convicted Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell wants the transcripts of the testimony heard by the grand jury that indicted her to remain sealed because she doesn’t know what’s in them and they could hurt her appeal.
Maxwell’s lawyers made her position clear as they responded Aug. 5 to the Justice Department’s request for a Manhattan federal court to release the documents. The department is seeking the transcripts as it tries to quell public outrage over its decision not to release the FBI’s investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died in a Manhattan federal jail in 2019, as he awaited a sex-trafficking trial.
“Jeffrey Epstein is dead. Ghislaine Maxwell is not,” Maxwell’s lawyers, David Oscar Markus and Melissa Madrigal, wrote in their Aug. 5 court filing.
“Whatever interest the public may have in Epstein, that interest cannot justify a broad intrusion into grand jury secrecy in a case where the defendant is alive, her legal options are viable, and her due process rights remain,” the lawyers added.
More: Trump administration won’t release the Epstein files, but what would they contain?
The filing comes after Maxwell was quietly moved out of a Florida federal prison and into a lower-security federal facility in Texas in recent days. That mysterious shift followed her participation in two days of interviews with the Justice Department, as the White House battles calls for more transparency on Epstein and his potential accomplices.
Federal grand jury transcripts are typically kept secret. Still, the Justice Department has argued that the public’s interest in Epstein’s and Maxwell’s cases justifies treating the transcripts from their grand jury proceedings differently.
Already, a Florida federal court denied the Justice Department’s request for grand jury transcripts tied to an Epstein-related investigation from around 2006 to be unsealed. The department’s similar requests in Maxwell’s and Epstein’s New York federal cases remain pending.
Maxwell’s lawyers noted that she didn’t have a chance to cross-examine the witnesses who testified before her grand jury, and she hasn’t been allowed to review the transcripts herself. Maxwell currently has an appeal pending at the U.S. Supreme Court over her convictions in her federal sex-trafficking trial, for which she’s serving a 20-year prison sentence.
“Disclosure of grand jury materials at this stage risks irreparably tainting the legal process by injecting sealed testimony into the public debate while judicial review is ongoing,” the lawyers wrote.
It’s not clear how much the public would learn, even if the New York federal transcripts are released. The Justice Department revealed July 29 that the transcripts cover only two witnesses, an FBI agent and a detective with the New York Police Department. At least part of their testimony involved describing victim accounts that were later shared by the victims themselves at Maxwell’s public trial, according to the Justice Department.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ghislaine Maxwell fights DOJ bid to unseal grand jury documents
