Engelmayer, an Obama appointee, noted that the Maxwell grand jury didn’t hear testimony from firsthand witnesses, victims or the like, but rather simply met “for the quotidian purpose of returning an indictment.” He said the evidence presented to the Maxwell grand jury “is today, with only very minor exceptions, a matter of public record.”

Rather than exposing new information, Engelmayer wrote, unsealing would expose the disingenuousness behind the government’s claim that unsealing would be revelatory.

“A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion — aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” the judge wrote.

“A member of the public familiar with the Maxwell trial record who reviewed the grand jury materials that the Government proposes to unseal would thus learn next to nothing new,” he wrote, adding that the materials “do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor.”.....

Maxwell’s appeal is pending before the Supreme Court, and we could learn in the fall whether the justices will take it up.

A federal judge in Florida previously rejected unsealing grand jury information related to Epstein. And still pending in New York is the government’s motion to unseal grand jury information in his case there, which the government has been litigating in tandem with the Maxwell unsealing effort. The judge overseeing Epstein’s New York case has not yet ruled, but given the apparently limited nature of the grand jury presentation in that case as well, he could rule in a similar fashion to Engelmayer.