A federal judge on Wednesday handed the Trump administration another setback in its effort to make public grand jury transcripts related to Jeffrey Epstein.

President Donald Trump last week directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek to have grand jury transcripts disclosed after a firestorm of anger erupted when the Justice Department said there was no Epstein client list, as Bondi said had existed.

Judges overseeing the 2019 case pending against Epstein and the 2021 case against Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell on Tuesday resisted the Department of Justice’s initial request to make the transcripts public.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Robin L. Rosenberg outright rejected a Justice Department request to allow transcripts from 2005 and 2007 grand juries that investigated Epstein to be made public, according to The Washington Post.

As noted by Politico, Rosenberg was appointed by former President Barack Obama.

“Eleventh Circuit law does not permit this Court to grant the Government’s request; the Court’s hands are tied-a point that the Government concedes,” Rosenberg wrote in her ruling.

“The Government’s Petition to unseal the grand jury transcripts is not based on any of the exceptions” outlined in the federal rules that can make grand jury transcripts public, she wrote.

“The Government does not assert that disclosure is appropriate under any exception in Rule 6(e)(3)(E). Instead, it argues that special circumstances exist and that the policy reasons for grand jury secrecy have expired,” she wrote.

“However, the Government’s stated rationale are not exceptions in Rule 6. The Court cannot grant a request for disclosure unless one of the five exceptions in Rule 6(e)(3)(E) applies,” she wrote.

Rosenberg also rejected the Justice Department’s request to transfer the request to the Southern District of New York, where its other efforts to make transcripts public are in the courts.

“The Court denies the Government’s request for transfer for two reasons. The Court concludes that the Government must argue a potentially valid exception for the Court to consider a request for transfer of the Petition to another district, which the Government has not done. The Court also concludes that, in the alternative, the applicable standard for a transfer of the Petition to another district is not met in this case,” she wrote.

In very similar rulings, judges handling the 2019 Epstein case and 2021 Maxwell case said that the initial request from the Justice Department fell short of what was needed to make the records public, even with redactions.

The Justice Department was given until July 29 to explain why it wanted the transcripts released and to provide the judges with the full transcripts, as well as to show how the Justice Department would like them released with redactions to address privacy concerns of the victims.

The judges also noted that Epstein’s victims deserve a chance to weigh in on their feelings about a potential release, and they set a deadline of August 5 for them to make their opinions known to the courts.

Maxwell’s attorneys indicated they wanted to get access to the transcript, but U.S. District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer shot that down on Wednesday.

“It is black-letter law that defendants are generally not entitled to access grand jury materials,” he wrote in his ruling.

He rejected her attorneys’ claim that the information was needed to craft their reply as to her position on the potential release of the transcripts.

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