Paul Engelmayer

Paul A. Engelmayer (born 1961, in New York City) is a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, appointed by Barack Obama in 2011, who earlier clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, served in the Office of the Solicitor General and headed the Major Crimes Unit of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office. He took over United States v. Maxwell, the criminal case of Ghislaine Maxwell, after Judge Alison Nathan was elevated to the Second Circuit, and in 2025 and 2026 ruled on the unsealing of its grand jury record, first refusing the request of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and then granting it under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. In February 2025, sitting in emergency Part I, he barred political appointees and special government employees from Treasury payment systems.¹²³

Career

Engelmayer graduated from Harvard College in 1983 and Harvard Law School in 1987, after working as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York in 1983 and 1984. He clerked for Judge Patricia M. Wald of the D.C. Circuit from 1987 to 1988 and for Justice Marshall from 1988 to 1989. He was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1989 to 1994 and 1996 to 1999, as deputy chief appellate attorney in 1994 and chief of the Major Crimes Unit from 1996 to 1999, and Assistant to the Solicitor General from 1994 to 1996. He was in private practice in New York from 2000 to 2011. Obama nominated him on February 2, 2011 to the seat vacated by Gerard E. Lynch; he was confirmed on July 26 and commissioned on July 27, 2011.¹

Leon Black's Racketeering Suit

In 2022 Engelmayer dismissed with prejudice a racketeering suit by the financier Leon Black, who had left Apollo Global Management after the disclosure of his payments to Jeffrey Epstein, against his Apollo co-founder Josh Harris, Guzel Ganieva and others, calling the claims "glaringly deficient in fundamental respects."⁴

The Maxwell Grand Jury Record

On July 18, 2025 Blanche, formerly Donald Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer, entered an appearance for the United States in Maxwell's closed case and moved to unseal the grand jury transcripts (ECF Nos. 784, 785); he questioned Maxwell under limited immunity on July 24 and 25. On August 11, 2025 Engelmayer denied the motion (ECF No. 809, 794 F. Supp. 3d 215), holding that Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) barred disclosure and that "[t]he Government's invocation of special circumstances . . . fails at the threshold." Judge Richard M. Berman relied on the ruling nine days later in denying the government's parallel motion in United States v. Epstein.²⁵

After the Epstein Files Transparency Act became law on November 19, 2025, the government renewed the motion (ECF No. 810). Engelmayer ordered victim submissions through a dedicated Justice Department mailbox, docketed three redacted victim letters, and on December 9, 2025 granted the motion and modified the 2020 protective order, subject to the Act's protection of victims' identities (ECF No. 820). Berman granted the matching motion in the Epstein docket the next day.²⁵

On January 13, 2026 Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, the Act's sponsors, asked Engelmayer to appoint "a special master or independent monitor" over the Justice Department's compliance, reporting that as of January 5 it had "publicly released only 12,285 documents" of "more than 2 million documents potentially responsive to the Act," and that "DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act." Victim letters, including one from Haley Robson transmitted by the government, were cited in support. He denied the motion on January 21, 2026 (ECF No. 844): "This federal criminal case does not give the Court jurisdiction over, or authority to supervise, DOJ's compliance with the EFTA, a civil records-disclosure statute." Amici, he held, may not raise issues no party has pursued; his December ruling had removed the protective order as an obstacle, but "[i]t was the EFTA that" required release. He described the case as "effectively closed," with Maxwell's pro se motion under 28 U.S.C. 2255 "the only outstanding item." Status letters on the Department's review followed over the name of U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton.⁶

The Treasury Order

On the evening of February 8, 2025, "sitting in its Part I capacity," Engelmayer received the application of the attorneys general of 19 states, led by New York, for a temporary restraining order against a Treasury policy that expanded access to the payment systems of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service to political appointees and "special government employees." Finding that the states faced irreparable harm from "the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking," and that their statutory claims presented "as particularly strong," he restrained the defendants from granting access to Treasury payment records and systems except to civil servants who had passed background checks and security clearances, and ordered anyone else given access since January 20 "to immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department's records and systems, if any." The case was assigned the same evening to Judge Jeannette A. Vargas.³