NEW YORK (AP) — Transcripts of grand jury testimony that led to sex trafficking charges against Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime confidante Ghislaine Maxwell shouldn’t be released, a judge ruled Monday in a stinging decision suggesting the Trump administration’s real motive for wanting them unsealed was to fool the public with an “illusion” of transparency.

U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said in a written decision that federal law almost never allows for the release of grand jury materials and that making the documents public casually was a bad idea.

The judge also belittled the Justice Department’s argument that releasing grand jury materials might reveal new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, calling that premise “demonstrably false.”

The decision was a blow to President Donald Trump, who had called for the release of transcripts as he seeks to dispel rumors and quell criticism about his long ago involvement with Epstein, who killed himself in jail in 2019. Trump campaigned on a promise to release files related to Epstein, but was met with criticism — including from many of his own supporters — when the small number of records released by his Justice Department lacked any real bombshells.

Transcripts reveal ‘next to nothing new,’ judge says

In his ruling, Engelmayer wrote that after privately reviewing the grand jury transcripts, anyone familiar with the evidence from Maxwell’s 2021 sex trafficking trial would “learn next to nothing new” and “would come away feeling disappointed and misled.”

“The materials do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor. They do not discuss or identify any client of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s. They do not reveal any heretofore unknown means or methods of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s crimes,” Engelmayer said.

He said the materials also don’t reveal new locations where crimes occurred, new sources of Maxwell and Epstein’s wealth, the circumstances of Epstein’s death or the path of the government investigation.

The best argument to release the transcripts might be that “doing so would expose as disingenuous the Government’s public explanations for moving to unseal,” Engelmayer wrote.

“A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion — aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” he said.

Another federal judge is weighing whether to release transcripts from the separate grand jury proceeding that led to Epstein’s indictment.

Florida lawyer Brad Edwards, who has represented nearly two dozen Epstein accusers, said he didn’t disagree with the ruling and most wanted to protect victims. “The grand jury materials contain very little in the way of evidentiary value anyway,” he said.

Maxwell, Epstein’s ex-girlfriend, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping Epstein sexually abuse several underage girls. Her lawyer, Bobbi Sternheim, declined comment. The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Decision comes amid a renewed fervor over Epstein case

The Epstein saga has again become a national flashpoint years after Epstein served jail time and registered as a sex offender after pleading guilty to Florida prostitution offenses in a 2008 deal that let him avoid federal charges then.

President Donald Trump raised questions about Epstein’s death, and Trump allies stoked conspiracy theories that dark secrets were covered up to protect powerful people. Some of those allies got powerful positions in Trump’s Justice Department and promised to pull back the curtain on the Epstein investigation — but then announced this summer nothing more would be released and a long-rumored Epstein “client list” doesn’t exist.

The about-face amplified the clamor for transparency. After trying unsuccessfully to change the subject and denigrating his own supporters for not moving on, Trump told Attorney General Pam Bondi to ask courts to unseal the grand jury transcripts.

With pressure mounting in recent weeks, the Justice Department’s second-in-command, Todd Blanche, recently interviewed Maxwell over two days in an effort to show that the Trump administration was serious about looking for any additional evidence of misconduct.

Maxwell was moved from a federal prison in Florida to a prison camp in Texas after speaking with Blanche.

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Justice Department for Epstein-related files and has moved to interview former President Bill Clinton, who was among a number of luminaries once acquainted with Epstein.

The decision about the grand jury transcripts in Maxwell’s case doesn’t affect thousands of other pages the government possesses but has declined to release. The Justice Department has said much of the material was court-sealed to protect victims and little of it would’ve come out if Epstein had gone to trial.

A federal judge in Florida declined to release grand jury documents from an investigation there in 2005 and 2007.

Maxwell, who’s appealing her conviction, opposed unsealing the documents.

NEW YORK (AP) — A top official at the Federal Reserve said Saturday that this month’s stunning, weaker-than-expected report on the U.S. job market is strengthening her belief that interest rates should be lower.

Michelle Bowman was one of two Fed officials who voted a week and a half ago in favor of cutting interest rates. Such a move could help boost the economy by making it cheaper for people to borrow money to buy a house or a car, but it could also threaten to push inflation higher.

Bowman and a fellow dissenter lost out after nine other Fed officials voted to keep interest rates steady, as the Fed has been doing all year. The Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell, has been adamant that he wants to wait for more data about how President Donald Trump’s tariffs are affecting inflation before the Fed makes its next move.

At a speech during a bankers’ conference in Colorado on Saturday, Bowman said that “the latest labor market data reinforce my view” that the Fed should cut interest rates three times this year. The Fed has only three meetings left on the schedule in 2025.

The jobs report that arrived last week, only a couple of days after the Fed voted on interest rates, showed that employers hired far fewer workers last month than economists expected. It also said that hiring in prior months was much lower than initially thought.

On inflation, meanwhile, Bowman said she is getting more confident that Trump’s tariffs “will not present a persistent shock to inflation” and sees it moving closer to the Fed’s 2% target. Inflation has come down substantially since hitting a peak above 9% after the pandemic, but it has been stubbornly remaining above 2%.

The Fed’s job is to keep the job market strong, while keeping a lid on inflation. Its challenge is that it has one main tool to affect both those areas, and helping one by moving interest rates up or down often means hurting the other.

A fear is that Trump’s tariffs could box in the Federal Reserve by sticking the economy in a worst-case scenario called “stagflation,” where the economy stagnates but inflation is high. The Fed has no good tool to fix that, and it would likely have to prioritize either the job market or inflation before helping the other.

On Wall Street, expectations are that the Fed will have to cut interest rates at its next meeting in September after the U.S. jobs report came in so much below economists’ expectations.

Trump has been calling angrily for lower interest rates, often personally insulting Powell while doing so. He has the opportunity to add another person to the Fed’s board of governors after an appointee of former President Joe Biden stepped down recently.

WASHINGTON (AP) — American businesses and consumers soon will have a better idea of how President Donald Trump’s foreign trade agenda might affect them now that the United States has imposed higher tariffs on products from dozens of countries.

It’s been nearly 100 years since the nation had an overall import tax rate as high as the one set Thursday. But the individual impact on business costs and consumer prices could vary as much as the tariffs applied to goods of nearly 70 U.S. trading partners, from complicated economies like the European Union to the small African nation of Lesotho.

Exports from a majority of them are getting taxed at 15%. For a handful of countries in Asia, the rate is 19%. Products from the rest are subject to taxes of 20% to 50%. Meanwhile, a 55% tariff on Chinese-made goods is scheduled to take effect next week if a U.S.-China trade deal is not agreed on before then.

Businesses in the U.S. and abroad have been dealing in various ways since February with Trump’s fluctuating tariffs on specific products and countries. Many automakers appeared to have absorbed the costs for now. But recent government data indicated that retail prices for groceries, furniture and appliances started creeping up in June.

Because tariffs are a tax on imports, economists have expected U.S. consumers to foot at least part of the bill eventually.

The country-specific round enforced Thursday, together with the president’s earlier tariffs on specific sectors such as automobiles and steel, will increase prices 1.8% in the short term, the Budget Lab at Yale estimated. That’s the equivalent of a $2,400 loss of income per U.S. household, according to the non-partisan policy research center

The projections were based on an analysis of duties implemented this year through Wednesday, as well as a doubling of the levy on items made in India that Trump said would be implemented near the end of August.

“Retailers have been able to hold the line on pricing so far, but the new increased tariffs will significantly raise costs for U.S. retailers, manufacturers and consumers,” Jon Gold, vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation trade group, said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press.

Here’s what to know about the tariffs and where U.S. consumers are most likely to notice effects:

How we got here

Trump unveiled sweeping import taxes on goods coming into the U.S. from 66 countries, the European Union, Taiwan and the Falkland Islands in April. He said the “reciprocal” tariffs were meant to boost domestic manufacturing and restore fairness to global trade.

The president paused the country-specific tariffs a week later but applied a 10% tax to most imports. In early July, he began notifying countries that their exports would be subject to higher tariffs on Aug. 1 unless they reached trade deals. A week ago, he pushed the start date to Thursday.

In the meantime, Trump announced a 35% tariff on imports from Canada, but delayed action on Mexico while negotiations continued. However, a free trade agreement reached with Mexico and Canada during Trump’s first term shields most of those countries’ products from punishing duties.

The president also ordered a 50% tariff on goods from Brazil. This week, he signed an executive order to take India’s tariff rate from 25% to 50% for its purchases of Russian oil. The timing gives India and Russia a chance to negotiate with the Trump administration.

Other duties not specific to countries remain in place, such as a 50% tariff on imported aluminum and steel announced in June. Trump also threatened 100% tariffs on computer chips that aren’t made in the U.S. The administration has said tariffs are still coming on imported pharmaceutical drugs.

Tariffs are already impacting prices

The U.S. Commerce Department reported on July 31 that prices rose 2.6% in June, up from an annual pace of 2.4% in May. Earlier in July, the government reported that its primary inflation measure, the Consumer Price Index, also ticked higher in June as the cost of furniture, toys and other frequently imported items increased.

Shoppers should be prepared to pay more for clothes and shoes because the combined tariffs “disproportionately affect clothing and textiles,” according to the Budget Lab at Yale. It estimates that shoe prices will go up 39% temporarily and stay 19% above where they are now. For apparel, the Budget Lab put the comparable figures at 37% and 18%.

Overall, Americans face an average tax of 18.6% for imported products, the highest rate since 1933, the research center said.

Food and drink prices will climb

The tariffs will almost certainly result in higher food prices, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. The U.S. simply doesn’t make enough of some products, like bananas or coffee, to satisfy demand. Fish, beer and liquor are also likely to get more expensive, the foundation said.

The U.S. Wine Trade Alliance and other alcohol industry trade groups sent a letter to Trump that warned a 15% tariff on European wines and spirits could result in more than 25,000 American job losses and cost the industry nearly $2 billion in lost sales.

“Mr. President, we need toasts, not tariffs, as we head into the most important season for our industry,” read the letter dated Wednesday.

Wine distributors and retailers avoided price increases before now by accelerating shipments from France and other EU countries earlier in the year. But with the EU’s tariff rate raised to 15% on Thursday, customers may see European wines costing 30% more in September, U.S. Wine Trade Alliance President Ben Aneff said.

Car prices hold steady — so far

Some automakers already raised prices to counteract tariffs. Luxury sports car maker Ferrari said last week it was waiting for more details of Trump’s trade deal with the EU before scaling back a 10% surcharge it put on most vehicles in the U.S.

For the most part, automakers waited for details instead of passing on tariff costs to consumers. But that could change.

General Motors said on July 22 that the impact of the tariffs could get more pronounced in the third quarter of the year. GM has estimated the tariffs will cost it $4 billion to $5 billion this year.

Toyota reported Thursday a 37% drop in profits in the April-June quarter, cutting its full-year earnings forecasts largely because of Trump’s tariffs.

Still a clouded picture

Even with so many new tariffs kicking in, the tariff situation remains fluid. Trump’s use of an emergency powers law to implement tariffs is being challenged in the courts. The case is expected to wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Moreover, the tariffs on goods from China haven’t been finalized. Consumers may start seeing more effects when the administration ends a tax exemption for small parcels sent from other countries.

Trump last week signed an order to suspend the “de minimis” exemption that has allowed shipments valued at $800 or less to enter the U.S. duty-free. International e-commerce companies have widely used the rule to avoid paying customs charges.

Trump withdrew the exemption in early April for goods shipped from China and Hong Kong tariff-free. It is now set to be eliminated for low-value packages from every country on Aug. 29.