The Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge to unseal grand jury testimony from the prosecution of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. The move came amid growing pressure from both parties for the Trump administration to release more information about the case.

The request was filed in U.S. District Court in the New York City borough of Manhattan, where Epstein was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges six years ago when he was found dead by hanging in his jail cell. The New York City medical examiner ruled the death a suicide.

The government also sought the unsealing of grand jury testimony from the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, the socialite who in a 2021 trial was convicted of helping Epstein facilitate his sex-trafficking scheme and sentenced to 20 years in prison. She has appealed her conviction.

“Public officials, lawmakers, pundits and ordinary citizens remain deeply interested and concerned about the Epstein matter,” Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, wrote in a motion to the court seeking to unseal the transcripts. “The time for the public to guess what they contain should end.”

Epstein’s relationships with powerful people, and the manner of his death, have fueled conspiracy theories for years, particularly among a portion of Trump’s right-wing base.

Lately, members of Congress from both parties have joined the calls for the government to release more information about its investigation.

Trump ordered Bondi to make the request hours after The Wall Street Journal reported on a 50th birthday greeting that it said Trump sent Epstein in 2003, including a sexually suggestive drawing, an expression of friendship and a reference to secrets they shared.

The president vehemently denied the report, which The New York Times has not verified. On Friday, he filed a lawsuit in Florida against the Journal; its publisher, Dow Jones; Rupert Murdoch, founder of News Corp, the parent company of Dow Jones; Robert Thomson, News Corp CEO; and two Journal reporters.

An angry Trump, referring to himself in the third person in a long Truth Social post, claimed that Murdoch had agreed to “take care of” the article but apparently lacked the authority to overrule the decisions of the paper’s top editor, Emma Tucker.

He accused the Journal of publishing a “false, malicious and defamatory” report.