'Wow': CNN host stunned by legal expert's take on Trump's Epstein plan
President Donald Trump has directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to release grand jury transcripts related to Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking case, but a legal expert explained that left out most of the information about the case that his MAGA supporters had hoped to learn.
The president publicly called on Bondi to issue the transcripts after the Wall Street Journal reported on a bawdy letter Trump had allegedly written in 2003 to the disgraced financier on his 50th birthday, and legal analyst Elie Honig told "CNN News Central" about the strict boundaries that request set around the materials that could potentially be released.
"The grand jury testimony itself is only going to be a fairly small fraction of the entire file," Honig said. "In addition to that, we now have this word 'pertinent,' and so that begs the question pertinent to what, and pertinent as determined by who? So it gives the attorney general, in some respect, wiggle room. But it also puts her in a very difficult position where apparently she's going to have to a decide what's pertinent, and then B, you have to go in front of a federal judge and get permission to release grand jury materials. So there's a lot of hurdles still in place here."
The FBI has possession of some 300 gigabytes of information from its case file on Epstein, and Bondi actually has authority over that massive trove of evidence, but not over grand jury materials specified by the president.
"That's millions and millions of pages of documents. you can sort of separate it into two perceptual categories," Honig said. "There's grand jury materials. Those are presumptively confidential by law, you cannot turn them over to the public as a prosecutor, unless you get a judge's permission first. But then there's all the rest of it that, something that the president, the attorney general, can decide on their own without going through a judge first and say, 'I'm going to release this,' and so what the president has done here is said, 'I only want to focus on the narrow category,' the grand jury stuff that you first have to go to a judge for."
"As to all that other stuff, the remaining the majority of the file, that is entirely up to the AG and the president," Honig added. "If they want to release that today, they can do that."
Host John Berman was stunned by the explanation for how Trump placed limitations on releasing materials sought by his MAGA supporters.
"Okay, wow," Berman said. "I want to make that even more clear. What the president is now publicly called for is for the attorney general to push for the release of stuff that they can't control, the release of – a court can. What he's not calling for is a release of information that he and the attorney general can control."
Honig said he had understood correctly.
"Exactly, so the when when you think of a file, you have your grand jury materials," Honig said. "Actually, you typically store your grand jury materials in a physically different-colored folder because you need to set that aside because that's the confidential stuff. So all the stuff that's in a red or yellow folder, all the grand jury materials that has to go through a judge. That's what Donald Trump is saying [he wants Bondi] to ask a judge to release. But then the bulk of the file is going to be everything else, everything that is not grand jury testimony. All of that is within Donald Trump's, within Pam Bondi's discretion to release now."
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