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Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document 204-8 Filed 04/16/21 Page3of6
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Indeed, the Chemical Bank opinion specifically rejected judicial protection for the type of
information the Protective Order appears to cover in the Litigation:
Avoiding embarrassment may be a reason for a party to seek
confidentiality. It is not by itself.a valid reason for courts to uphold
confidentiality as against a legitimate law enforcement need for the
information. Courts must honor restrictions laid down by the Fourt
or Fifth Amendment or applicable statutes. But aside from those
restrictions, hiding possible criminal violations from law
enforcement authorities is hardly a ground for judicial protection of
confidentiality.
Chemical Bank, 154 F.R.D. at 94 (emphasis added). Although parties may rely on confidentiality
agreements and protective orders generally, such classification “is not binding on the court” and
the “risk of disclosure is well known to the Bar, in part because disclosure may be required where
such information is needed for judicial decisions, to the basis for which the public should have
access. /d. (collecting cases).
Under some circumstances, courts in this Circuit have applied a balancing test to evaluate
the government’s ability to obtain access to materials covered by a protective order. Specifically,
in Martindell v. International Tel. and Tel. Corp., 594 F.2d 291 (2d Cir. 1979), the government
informally—and without use of a grand jury subpoena—sought access to discovery materials from
a civil litigation. The Court held that the Government was not entitled to the materials unless it
could show either that the protective order was improvidently granted or some extraordinary
circumstance or compelling need for the material; see also In re Grand Jury Subpoena Duces
Tecum Dated Apr. 19, 1991 (“Subpoena Duces Tecum”), 945 F.2d 1221, 1224 (2d Cir. 1991) (in
connection with bankruptcy proceeding, and citing Martindell, vacating denial of a motion to
quash a grand jury subpoena seeking production of documents subject to protective order and
remanding for determination of showing that the order was improvidently granted or of
extraordinary circumstance or compelling need).
As an initial matter, the Court need not employ the Martindell balancing test here. This is
so for two reasons. First, Martindell and cases employing its balancing test generally relate to
motions to quash or other challenges to a grand jury subpoena, or else instances where the
Government sought protected information without such grand jury process. See Martindell, 594
F.2d 291 (in which the government informally, and without use of a grand jury subpoena, sought
access to discovery materials); Subpoena Duces Tecum, 945 F.2d at 1224 (vacating denial of a
motion to quash a grand jury subpoena). Here, there is no such deficiency in the form of request
nor a challenge by the recipient of the subpoena. Indeed, in Chemical Bank, which cited
such as documents and depositions are not likely to include the kind of confidential business
information that Chemical Bank describes as having the potential to give rise to “difficult
balancing.” See id.; see also Guiffre, Protective Order (“Prot. Order”) (Dkt. 62) at 2 (defining
“confidential” information simply as “information that is confidential and implicates common law
and statutory privacy interests of (a) plaintiff Virginia Roberts Guiffre and (b) defendant Ghislaine
Maxwell” and making no reference to trade secrets or other confidential business information).
SDNY_GM_00000849
CONFIDENTIAL
DOJ-OGR-00003546
Extracted Information
Dates
Document Details
| Filename | DOJ-OGR-00003546.jpg |
| File Size | 1139.9 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 94.7% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 3,581 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-03 16:37:54.913856 |