The outlook wasn’t brilliant for Attorney General Pam Bondi. She moved to unseal the Epstein grand jury minutes, even though she knew she would lose.
Grand jury minutes are secret by law, and a reveal is rare. The precedents were decidedly against her, and three judges in two district courts eventually rejected her motion to unseal. It is a rare occurrence for an attorney general to make a motion wanting to lose, knowing she will lose.
We have an adversarial legal system in this country. Real litigators like to bring motions they think they can win. Bondi’s showcase effort to unseal the grand jury records, however, was a kamikaze mission from the start.
Only a Department of Justice headed by Bondi, loyal to Trump to a fault, would do such a thing. She claims to want to de-weaponize the law, but she has not said she is above subterfuge. The reasons will appear as self-evident.
Trump sent Bondi on a fool’s errand. In July, he directed her to seek the release of the grand jury testimony related to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, accused of sexually trafficking minors, and Ghislaine Maxwell, his convicted accomplice. And one thing we know about Bondi is that she does what Trump tells her to do.
Trump must have known that the grand jury testimony held nothing of interest or that had not been previously disclosed. Bondi certainly told him that in the Epstein and Maxwell cases, prosecutors had engaged in the practice of having an investigator summarize what was in the files. A grand jury in federal court can indict based on hearsay testimony, and this is a classic example.
Trump thought he could impress everyone by ordering Bondi to make a full disclosure. She had already released a brief unsigned joint Justice Department and FBI memo disclosing only that Epstein had indeed killed himself and there was no “client list” in existence. Polls show that more than two-thirds of the country believes Team Trump is hiding facts about Epstein.
MAGA loyalists had long wanted to see what was in those files. Biden had held them close to the vest for four years, and this raised the lurking suspicion that the records were littered with names of prominent and influential Democrats. Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche went to the White House to warn Trump that his own name was in the Epstein documents. So he came up with a political stunt, pivoting to the grand jury minutes, which he must have known would be shrouded in secrecy under the law.
Disclosure of the minutes required a court order that he and Bondi knew he could never get. In federal procedure, you get an order by making a motion before the court — in this case before two courts. The government lawyers knew this would fail. What unfolded was a classic “Casey at the Bat,” except one where Casey wanted to strike out.
Naturally, Bondi began in Florida, where she and Trump knew the territory. In July, Florida District Judge Robin Rosenberg rejected the Justice Department’s submission. “Strike One,” Rosenberg said.
“Kill the umpire,” cried the MAGA fans, and likely they would have, had not the diverter-in-chief raised his hand.
Bondi then moved again, in the hated Southern District of New York, where Epstein and Maxwell had been indicted. Once more “the spheroid flew.” And on August 11, District Judge Paul Engelmayer said “Strike Two.” He denied the motion, finding that Maxwell’s grand jury records would reveal “next to nothing new” and also labeled Trump’s transparent ploy a “diversion.”
“Fraud!” cried the MAGAs. But “one scornful look” from the White House “and the audience was awed.”
District Judge Richard Berman’s ruling represented the third and final rejection of the administration’s requests to unseal the records.
“The government is the logical party to make comprehensive disclosure to the public of the Epstein Files,” wrote Berman. “By comparison, the instant grand jury motion appears to be a ‘diversion’ from the breadth and scope of the Epstein files in the government’s possession, The grand jury testimony is merely a hearsay snippet of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged conduct.’”
Berman quoted and agreed with Engelmayer’s findings. “The information contained in the Epstein grand jury transcripts pales in comparison to the Epstein investigation information and materials in the hands of the Department of Justice,” he wrote.
The Epstein grand jury, as with its counterpart in Maxwell’s case, consisted entirely of testimony by law enforcement officials, not victims. The same FBI agent who testified before Epstein’s grand jury also testified before Maxwell’s.
Berman noted: “The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has recently stated that the [Justice Department] informed the Committee it will begin providing Epstein-related records ‘this week.’” But Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the committee, stated that the overwhelming majority of the over 30,000 pages that the Justice Department produced had already been made public.
This is the appearance but not the reality of an investigation — with the conclusion of cover-up almost incontestable.
The denouement, with apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer: “Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright; the band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, and somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout” — and, ironically, there is joy in Trumpville, for mighty Bondi, accomplishing her mission, has struck out.
James D. Zirin, author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York’s Southern District. He is also the host of the public television talk show and podcast Conversations with Jim Zirin.
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