Trump tells Bondi to seek release of Epstein grand jury testimony

Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks during a news conference at the White House in Washington, June 27, 2025. President Trump announced Thursday night, July 17, 2025, that he was authorizing Bondi to publicly release grand jury testimony from the prosecution of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, and Bondi said she would make that request in federal court on Friday. (Pete Marovich/The New York Times)

By Benjamin Weiser and Michael Gold

The Justice Department late last week asked a federal judge to unseal grand jury testimony from the prosecution of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. The move came amid growing pressure from both parties for the Trump administration to release more information about the case.

The request was filed in U.S. District Court in the New York City borough of Manhattan, where Epstein was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges six years ago when he was found dead by hanging in his jail cell. The New York City medical examiner ruled the death a suicide.

The government also sought the unsealing of grand jury testimony from the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, the socialite who in a 2021 trial was convicted of helping Epstein facilitate his sex-trafficking scheme and sentenced to 20 years in prison. She has appealed her conviction.

“Public officials, lawmakers, pundits and ordinary citizens remain deeply interested and concerned about the Epstein matter,” Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, wrote in a motion to the court seeking to unseal the transcripts. “The time for the public to guess what they contain should end.”

Epstein’s relationships with powerful people, and the manner of his death, have fueled conspiracy theories for years, particularly among a portion of Trump’s right-wing base. Lately, members of Congress from both parties have joined the calls for the government to release more information about its investigation.

Trump ordered Bondi to make the request hours after The Wall Street Journal reported on a 50th birthday greeting that it said Trump sent Epstein in 2003, including a sexually suggestive drawing, an expression of friendship and a reference to secrets they shared.

The president vehemently denied the report, which The New York Times has not verified. On Friday, he filed a lawsuit in Florida against the Journal; its publisher, Dow Jones; Rupert Murdoch, founder of News Corp, the parent company of Dow Jones; Robert Thomson, News Corp CEO; and two Journal reporters.

An angry Trump, referring to himself in the third person in a long Truth Social post, claimed that Murdoch had agreed to “take care of” the article but apparently lacked the authority to overrule the decisions of the paper’s top editor, Emma Tucker. He accused the Journal of publishing a “false, malicious and defamatory” report. A spokesperson for Dow Jones did not immediately comment on the lawsuit, which seeks a minimum of $10 billion in damages.

Obtaining court approval for unsealing the testimony could be difficult because the records are shielded by grand jury secrecy, to protect crime victims and witnesses. Judges rarely agree to grant public access to such materials.

In their motion, Bondi and Blanche said the Justice Department would work with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which prosecuted Epstein and Maxwell, to make “appropriate redactions” of information related to victims and “other personal identifying information” before releasing the transcripts.

“Transparency in this process will not be at the expense of our obligation under the law to protect victims,” the officials said in the motion.

The unsealing request was submitted to Judge Richard M. Berman in Manhattan, who was overseeing Epstein’s case in the weeks before his death. Berman was appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton in 1998.

Even if Berman unseals the testimony, it would most likely reflect only a small part of the evidence collected in the Epstein investigation, which includes thousands of documents and a vast trove of video evidence, including footage from video cameras in the jail.

Trump has been under pressure after Bondi withheld portions of investigative files related to Epstein that some of the president’s most fervent supporters have demanded be made public.

Bondi agreed to release some materials, including flight logs for Epstein’s private jets that were already publicly available, but she held back others, including what administration officials described as material involving child sexual abuse.

The Justice Department’s review of the files “revealed no incriminating ‘client list,’” the department wrote in an unsigned July memo, which continued: “There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

In the filing Friday, the Justice Department said it was adhering to those conclusions.

But the backlash has been intense. Portions of Trump’s political base have turned on him, and Democrats, eager for an issue to rally around, have called for the administration to release what have come to be known as the Epstein files.

By directing Bondi to make the court filings, Trump is moving to shift the responsibility for releasing more of the material onto a federal judge, which could lessen the political pressure he is feeling.

Democrats have cast the Trump administration’s move as an attempt to distract the attention of those who are criticizing the president.

“What about videos, photographs and other recordings?” Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., a former Southern District prosecutor, wrote on the social platform X. “What about FBI 302’s (witness interviews)? What about texts and emails? That’s where the evidence about Trump and others will be. Grand jury testimony will only relate to Epstein and Maxwell.”

Trump, who has long promoted conspiracy theories and used them to build his political movement, has urged his supporters to trust his administration’s conclusions.

But even some Republicans in Congress, including Speaker Mike Johnson, have called for the release of the Justice Department’s files about Epstein. And many hard-right lawmakers whose politics typically align closely with Trump said this week that their conservative voters had split from the president and were bombarding their offices with calls for greater transparency.

House Republicans, under pressure from Democrats and their own angry constituents, agreed Thursday night to lay the groundwork for a potential vote calling on the Justice Department to release material from the investigation. The measure is nonbinding and has not been scheduled for a vote, but it reflected a widening gulf between Trump and Congress on the issue.

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., a frequent Trump critic, undertook a long-shot procedural maneuver to force a floor vote on the matter, an effort that had drawn the support of at least eight other Republicans.

Massie’s resolution, which has a wider scope than the resolution passed Thursday, does not have the support of Republican leaders and would most likely require broad support from Democrats to pass.

Massie, in a social media post, criticized the resolution approved Thursday night as a toothless gesture that would not produce any new disclosures.

“Congress thinks you’re stupid,” he wrote. “The rules committee passed a NON-BINDING Epstein resolution, hoping folks will accept it as real.”