The president has been under intense political pressure from his base after Attorney General Pam Bondi withheld portions of investigative files on the disgraced financier.
The Justice Department asked a federal judge on Friday to unseal grand jury testimony from the prosecution of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein as President Trump seeks to dispel a storm of criticism and conspiracy theories coming from many of his supporters.
The request was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, where Mr. Epstein was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges six years ago when he was found dead by hanging in his jail cell about a month after he was arrested. 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 Mr. 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.”
Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche referred in the motion to Mr. Epstein as the “the most infamous pedophile in American history,” and called the facts of the case “a tale of national disgrace.”
The filings on Friday followed Mr. Trump’s announcement in a social media post Thursday night that he had authorized Ms. Bondi to “produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval.”
