Ghislaine Maxwell’s attorneys have announced that she is opposing the Trump administration’s request to unseal the grand jury transcripts from her sex trafficking case, despite her recent cooperation with the Justice Department.
Maxwell, according to her attorneys, has not seen the full contents of the transcripts, and for that reason, could not be expected to support them being made public, Fox News reported.
“Jeffrey Epstein is dead. Ghislaine Maxwell is not. 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,” her attorneys explained.
They also noted that Maxwell — who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking — still has a case pending before the Supreme Court, and said that making the grand jury testimony public could potentially derail those proceedings.
Maxwell’s attorneys had filed new documents several days prior, claiming that a controversial 2007 plea agreement with her late employer — convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — had also covered her even though it did not mention her by name.
That plea agreement — between Epstein and South Florida prosecutors — had allowed Epstein to plead guilty to state charges of solicitation and procuring minors for the purpose of prostitution, but it also stated that federal prosecutors would “not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein.” Several such co-conspirators were named in the filing, and Maxwell was not among them — but her attorneys claim that does not matter.
“Rather than grapple with the core principles of plea agreements, the government tries to distract by reciting a lurid and irrelevant account of Jeffrey Epstein’s misconduct,” Maxwell’s attorneys wrote. “But this case is about what the government promised, not what Epstein did.”
“This promise is unqualified. It is not geographically limited to the Southern District of Florida, it is not conditioned on the co-conspirators being known by the government at the time, it does not depend on what any particular government attorney may have had in his or her head about who might be a co-conspirator, and it contains no other caveat or exception,” they continued. “This should be the end of the discussion.”