Florida Judge Rejects Bid To Unseal Epstein Grand Jury Documents
The Justice Department also filed to unseal grand jury testimony from his 2019 indictment in New ... More York. Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
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San Francisco Chronicle
39 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Lawyers from both sides of the aisle decry Trump attacks on judges at California conference
It's time for the legal community to speak up about the increasing threats to judges across the country, a diverse pair of legal scholars said Thursday at the conference of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. 'Lawyers have to stand up to this, stand up for judicial independence," said Paul Clement, who has argued for conservative causes and was the Justice Department's solicitor general under President George W. Bush. Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley who has argued cases in the Supreme Court in favor of racial diversity and other liberal causes, cited Republican calls to impeach judges who have ruled against President Donald Trump. 'Being a judge now is more important than it's ever been in American history,' Chemerinsky told the audience of hundreds of lawyers and judges at the court's conference in Monterey. 'This is a time when we need judicial courage. We need the lawyers to be courageous too.' And in a reference to Trump's apparent disregard of judges' orders to stop sending immigrants, some of them with legal status, to prisons in Latin America, Chemerinsky said, 'If any president can violate court orders, can lock any of us up, the word for that is dictatorship.' Clement, as a Justice Department lawyer, argued before the Supreme Court, unsuccessfully, to try to overturn President Barack Obama's national health insurance law, the Affordable Care Act, and in defense of a law banning federal benefits for same-sex married couples. As a private attorney, he was on the winning side of last year's ruling allowing judges to decide the meaning of contested federal regulations, overturning a 1984 decision that required courts to accept an agency's interpretation when the meaning of a law was unclear. 'I'm a big believer in executive power,' Clement told the conference. But 'if you have an administration that is trying to push the limits … you're in a period of extraordinary tension.' He criticized Trump's Justice Department for prosecuting a federal judge in Wisconsin who directed an undocumented immigrant to the back door of her courtroom when federal immigration agents were looking for him, and for recent statements by Attorney General Pam Bondi denouncing 'unelected' federal judges who have frustrated the administration's program. It's time to 'turn down the volume,' Clement said. They spoke three days after the latest Republican proposal to break up the 9th Circuit, the nation's largest federal appeals court. The court hears appeals of federal cases from California, eight other Western states and the territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Its rulings are binding on federal judges in all of those states, including conservative dominions such as Idaho and Montana, and it has a 16-13 majority of judges appointed by Democratic presidents. The legislation by two Idaho Republicans, Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, would leave California, Hawaii and Guam in the 9th Circuit and create a new 12th Circuit court for the other states. It is the 60th such bill introduced since 1985, and would appear to have little chance of overcoming a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. The measure, Risch said in a statement, 'would split and modernize the 9th Circuit, allowing for more manageable caseloads and justice that aligns with the values of Idaho.'
Wall Street Journal
40 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Resilient Trump Lifted by Improved View of the Economy, WSJ Poll Finds
Buoyed by voters' improving views of the economy, President Trump's political standing is showing notable resilience, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds, despite the unpopularity of the GOP's big tax-and-spending law, dissatisfaction with Trump's tariff plan and high suspicion that the government is hiding important information about its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. The set of turbulent recent events, which also has included the administration's aggressive deportation program and the U.S. bombing of Iran's nuclear sites, has failed either to dent or improve the public's overall view of the president. Some 46% approve of his job performance—unchanged from April—with 52% disapproving.
CBS News
an hour ago
- CBS News
Top DOJ official Todd Blanche meets with Ghislaine Maxwell in Florida
Washington — Todd Blanche, the second highest-ranking Justice Department official, met with Ghislaine Maxwell at the U.S. attorney's office in Tallahassee on Thursday to discuss convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. David Oscar Markus, Maxwell's lawyer, declined to comment "on the substance" of the meeting, but told reporters outside the office that "there were a lot of questions and we went all day." "And she answered every one of them. She never did say, 'I'm not going to answer,' never declined," he said. "This is the first time that the government has asked questions, so we were thankful that the deputy attorney general came and asked her questions. It's the first time the government did it. So it was a good day." In a post Thursday night on X, Blanche wrote that he met with Maxwell and "will continue my interview of her tomorrow. The Department of Justice will share additional information about what we learned at the appropriate time." Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence at a low-security federal correctional institute in Tallahassee. She was convicted in 2021 for her role in helping Epstein recruit, groom and abuse underage girls. Blanche's meeting comes after he said earlier this week that he planned to meet with Maxwell "in the coming days." "Justice demands courage. For the first time, the Department of Justice is reaching out to Ghislaine Maxwell to ask: what do you know?" Blanche wrote on social media Tuesday. He said he contacted Maxwell's lawyers at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi. "I intend to meet with her soon. No one is above the law — and no lead is off-limits," Blanche wrote. Markus then confirmed that Maxwell's legal team was in discussions with the government. Pressure has been building on President Trump and his administration over Epstein's case after the Justice Department and FBI released a memo earlier this month that concluded Epstein did not have a "client list" and confirmed he died by suicide in 2019, shortly after he was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges. The memo also concluded that there was no "credible evidence" that the disgraced financier blackmailed prominent people. The Justice Department and FBI said they would not release any further information about Epstein's case. But the Trump administration's conclusions rankled some of his allies, who were skeptical of the Justice Department's claim that there is nothing left to divulge. Some of the administration's top officials, including Vice President JD Vance and FBI Director Kash Patel, had suggested before Mr. Trump returned to the White House that Democrats were hiding information about Epstein and his alleged list of clients. In an effort to quell the backlash, the Justice Department asked federal judges in New York who handled Epstein and Maxwell's cases to unseal transcripts from grand jury proceedings involving the two. Earlier this week, judges overseeing the requests each ordered the Justice Department to submit additional filings to the court about its efforts to unseal the grand jury records. The judges gave the defendants — in Epstein's case, his representative — and victims until Aug. 5 to lay out their positions on the proposed disclosure. It will be up to the judges to decide whether the grand jury material can be disclosed. If they grant the requests, the information will likely be heavily redacted, and it is likely to be weeks or months before the transcripts are unsealed. In addition to facing backlash from some of his allies, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have pushed to make material related to Epstein public. A House panel voted Wednesday to subpoena the Justice Department for files related to the federal probe into Epstein. The House Oversight Committee also subpoenaed Maxwell to sit for a deposition next month at the federal detention center in Tallahassee. Mr. Trump has acknowledged he and Epstein moved in the same social circles in Florida and New York from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. But the president said in 2019, following Epstein's arrest, that they hadn't spoken in 15 years. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Mr. Trump signed a "bawdy" letter to Epstein for his 50th birthday that said, in part, "may every day be another wonderful secret." CBS News has not independently seen or verified the letter. The president has denied that he wrote the letter, calling it "fake," and sued the Journal and its owners for defamation. He is seeking at least $20 billion in damages. The Journal reported Wednesday that when Justice Department officials reviewed documents related to Epstein earlier this year, they learned Mr. Trump's name appeared multiple times. Bondi and her deputy told the president at a White House meeting in May that his name was in the so-called Epstein files, as were those of other public figures, according to the Journal. Mr. Trump being mentioned does not mean he committed any wrongdoing. White House communications director Steven Cheung said in response to the Journal's report that "The fact is that The President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media, just like the Obama Russiagate scandal, which President Trump was right about." Skyler Henry contributed to this report.
