The Justice Department’s rushed effort to unseal the Ghislaine Maxwell grand jury transcripts is opening it up to accusations that prosecutors are once again violating a federal law protecting victims — potentially repeating the same mistakes made during convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s sweetheart plea deal 18 years ago.
This issue is now surfacing in New York federal court. U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman, who’s considering the DOJ’s unusual request, has given prosecutors until Friday to clarify whether they’ve given sufficient consideration to Epstein’s many victims — something their lawyers argue has not happened.
Federal prosecutors in South Florida kept Epstein’s victims in the dark when they struck a deal with him that allowed him to get away with a comfortably short detention, in which the wealthy financier spent time on “work release” by creating his own job.
Now, the Trump administration is quickly moving to address growing calls for transparency into the matter by trying to make public aspects of the investigation into Epstein’s convicted accomplice — once again without checking in first with the women who suffered, according to Bradley Edwards, an attorney representing several women who say they were raped as children by Epstein two decades ago.
He wrote a letter to the judge on Tuesday pointing out the irony of having the DOJ potentially violating federal protections for crime victims, arguing: “The government has once again proceeded in a manner that disregards the victims’ rights, suggesting that the hard-learned lessons of the past have not taken hold.”
“This omission reinforces the perception that the victims are, at best, an afterthought to the current administration,” Edwards added.
The sudden effort to unseal what are normally guarded grand jury proceedings began on a Friday evening last month, when the DOJ cited Maxwell’s case as a “matter of public interest.” The request was signed by the department’s second-highest ranking official and Trump’s former personal attorney, Todd Blanche, a sign of how important this is to the president.
Legal scholars have dismissed the move as a tactic meant to distract from public calls to release the FBI’s complete compendium of “Epstein files,” given that grand jury presentations only skim the surface of an investigation and wouldn’t likely address the dead billionaire’s supposed “client list” of wealthy friends suspected of partaking in the sexual abuse of girls.
However, Edwards argued that this attempt at a limited disclosure was carried out in a sloppy and potentially disastrous manner.
In his letter on Tuesday, he credited the DOJ for “promptly” identifying, at his urging, some of the victims who appear in the grand jury papers. But he still has his reservations.
“However, we have strong reason to believe that additional individuals — whom we also represent — were likely referenced in those materials but were not identified to us by the government,” Edwards wrote.
Neither Blanche nor the DOJ responded to requests for comment Wednesday morning.
Epstein’s initial plea deal, one that the Justice Department’s own internal review called “unusual and problematic,” led to a subsequent court fight over whether it violated a federal victims’ rights law. The girls he’d preyed on were never informed about the federal nonprosecution agreement until it had already been signed.
Bennett L. Gershman, who teaches about ethics at Pace University’s law school, told NOTUS there are “such clear similarities between the plea deal and what’s going on today.”
“It shows tremendous insensitivity, no concern at all for the victims here. It’s arrogant, dumb and mirrors dramatically the plea deal in 2007 — one of the worst, most egregious, most unbelievably dumb plea deals the federal government ever made,” he said.
The idea that crime victims should play a significant role in any law enforcement case is relatively new, a product of activism that grew during the severe 1980s crime wave. A Nevada Law Journal article that examined the Epstein plea deal debacle noted how President Ronald Reagan created a task force that paved the way for Congress to formally pass the Crime Victims’ Rights Act in 2004.
Gershman said “the spirit of the law is to recognise the victims … that they need to be consulted and informed of the processes going on,” even if they “obviously don’t call the shots.”
“They’re more than just objects or pieces of a puzzle. They’re human beings, and they deserve to know the government is on their side,” he said.
The question now is whether the Justice Department can thread the needle by releasing more information while respecting victims’ privacy, even as Epstein’s original plea deal continues to threaten to grant immunity to his enablers and accomplices.
Sigrid McCawley, another lawyer representing Epstein’s victims, wrote a separate letter to Judge Berman this week that focused instead on the pressing need to expose others in Epstein’s high-powered social circle — and she directly countered the DOJ and FBI joint statement on July 6 that it “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
“To the extent any of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s enablers and coconspirators who have thus far evaded accountability are implicated by the grand jury transcripts, their identities should not be shielded from the public,” she wrote. “Numerous individuals have yet to be investigated and several civil cases have been filed addressing other individuals’ central involvement with Epstein’s and Maxwell’s sex trafficking.”