The Department of Justice has revealed in a new court filing that the Jeffrey Epstein-related grand jury testimony that President Donald Trump demanded mostly just contains information that is already public knowledge.
Facing scrutiny over his years-long friendship with the convicted sex offender and anger from his base over his administration’s failure to produce new revelations in the case, the president instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this month to request the court to unseal the usually secret transcripts.
Critics quickly pointed out that the vast majority of the evidence from the so-called “Epstein files” wouldn’t have been included in grand jury proceedings for Epstein or his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Now, the DOJ’s latest memorandum to the federal court for the Southern District of New York has confirmed that just two witnesses testified during the grand jury proceedings.
They were an FBI agent who testified during both the Epstein and Maxwell proceedings, and a New York Police Department detective who testified during Maxwell’s case. The NYPD detective was also an officer with the FBI’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force.
During the grand jury proceedings, the witnesses—who still work for the FBI and NYPD—described statements the victims had made, the DOJ wrote in its filing. That testimony is considered hearsay, which is generally allowed during federal grand jury proceedings even though it’s not admissible at trial.
Reached by the Daily Beast on Wednesday, the Department of Justice said it had no additional comment on the matter.
Much of the information contained in the officers’ testimony was later revealed at Maxwell’s trial, where many of the victims themselves provided testimony that was consistent with the law enforcement officers’ statements to the grand jury, according to the filing.
Epstein died by suicide in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, but Maxwell eventually stood trial and was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison for luring and grooming the disgraced financier’s victims.
“Some [of the victims] have also made public those factual accounts in the course of civil litigation,” the DOJ wrote in its memorandum.
The government said that if the court granted its request to unseal the testimony, it would redact personal identifying information about third parties who “neither have been charged or alleged to be involved in the crimes with which Epstein and Maxwell were charged.”
The DOJ also admitted it hadn’t contacted the victims before filing the motion to unseal, but had since provided notice to all but one.
Trump was good friends with Epstein for more than 15 years, and has struggled recently to provide a coherent explanation of why their relationship ended in the early 2000s.
