A prominent national security expert on Wednesday summed up a new 12-page ruling rebuking the Trump administration as the judge saying, "You dumba--es, you got everything wrong."
Legal analysts and researcher Seamus Hughes uncovered the docket for the Epstein grand jury unsealing in the Southern District of Florida, noted national security expert Marcy Wheeler.
Judge Robin L. Rosenberg already denied the request from President Donald Trump's Justice Department, and the 12-page ruling walks through how the Justice Department's Todd Blanche wrote the filing without taking the laws of the Southern District of Florida into account.
Wheeler characterized it as a dozen pages of the judge saying, "You dumba--es, you got everything wrong."
The filing begins with the judge explaining to the government, "11th Circuit law does not permit the Court to grant the government's request." She adds, "The Court's hands are tied — a point that the Government concedes."
The DOJ cited the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), however, the judge writes, "the Government's Petition to unseal the grand jury transcripts is not based on any of the exceptions in Rule 6. Instead, the Government makes two arguments outside Rule 6."
"Contrary to the Government's stated basis and the Second and Seventh Circuits, the Eleventh Circuit has directly held that a district court 'do[es] not possess the ... power to order the release of grand jury records in instances not covered by' Rule 6(e)(3)(E)," continued Rosenberg in another section.
Another exception the DOJ attempted to deploy was that there are special circumstances that exist and that the policy around grand jury secrecy has "expired." The judge explained that those aren't exceptions to Rule 6 either. She repeated that she can't "grant a request for disclosure unless one of the five exceptions" in that rule applies.
