The Second Circuit in 1997 laid out a nine-factor test for judges to consider whether public interest outweighed rules of grand jury secrecy. In this case, observers opine it could come down to opposition from the surviving parties.

No doubt for mainstream-media readers, the Epstein rift came out of nowhere,” said a New York Times reporter. “We had not established how important this story was to a good chunk of the MAGA base.” A political reporter at a rival publication added,

It’s a Pizzagate/QAnon scandal. It’s a Trump scandal. It’s a Me Too scandal. It has something for every political subculture.

Trump had sought the release of documents after days of sustained pressure from some of his most loyal supporters.

Kelly has claimed Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter whose deep-dive investigation into Epstein in 2018 and the “deal of a lifetime” he received from Acosta brought renewed interest in the case, “rebooted” the story in an effort to take down Trump.

When the Trump administration, not known for understatement, finally engaged with the Jeffrey Epstein controversy, it did so with an understatement of the ages, seeking court approval for the release of grand-jury transcripts because it qualified “as a matter of public interest.”

The president seems to have lost his talent for shaping the story of the day. Or did the Wall Street Journal just throw him a lifeline?

It is confusing that it could have been out there in plain view, and ignored for so long.” Five years before Epstein’s death in 2019, Wolff, best known as the author of four bestselling books on Trump’s presidency,

The US president may have to pay a high price for turning on his own supporters for their dogged interest in the late billionaire's activities We may be witnessing Donald Trump's downfall. For most of the US president's critics,

And nothing suggests a cabal like the news story du jour. The Epstein Files is fast-becoming the JFK of our time, only it’s playing out not in a lone Oliver Stone weekend movie-theater release but in our pockets and on our laptops, on airport cable news broadcasts and barside phone-scrolling, the appeal of drama lapping the need for verification.