Mark Berman
The US Justice Department has publicly posted additional records related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including some that include allegations against President Donald Trump, following sharp criticism of the agency’s handling of the issue.
The agency said the files, which include details from FBI interviews with a woman who told authorities she had been sexually assaulted by Trump and Epstein, had not been previously released because they were incorrectly determined to be duplicates of other records.
The Justice Department has posted millions of pages of Epstein-related records online, including investigative materials, following the passage of a law last year mandating their release.
The woman, who was interviewed by the FBI in 2019, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her decades earlier when she was a minor. No evidence has emerged publicly to corroborate that accusation. The White House called the allegations against Trump “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence.”
The additional records were posted as Trump and his administration have struggled to combat controversies involving the release of files connected to Epstein, who died in federal custody in 2019 while facing charges of sex-trafficking and abusing girls.
The Justice Department has faced particular criticism over its response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a measure passed by Congress last year that demanded the agency make public a wide array of records by mid-December. While the agency did release more than 100,000 pages by that point, it did not make public most of its files until weeks later, well after the deadline.
Lawmakers have faulted the Justice Department for missing the deadline, failing to redact some information related to victims’ identities and redacting other information. Last month, after multiple media outlets reported that summaries of the woman’s account had not been included, the Justice Department said it was examining whether it wrongly withheld records containing allegations against Trump, who had been friends with Epstein for years before they had a falling out.
“As we have said countless times, President Trump has been totally exonerated by the release of the Epstein Files.”
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary
On Thursday, the Justice Department said in a social media post that it had discovered that “15 documents were incorrectly coded as duplicative.” Among these records were notes from multiple FBI interviews with the woman, who spoke to authorities following Epstein’s arrest in 2019.
According to the interview notes, the woman told investigators that she had been sexually assaulted by Epstein and Trump during separate incidents in the 1980s, when she was a minor. The Washington Post has been unable to corroborate these allegations or reach the woman.
Though summary reports of three of her FBI interviews were not included in files previously released by the administration, the Justice Department had already posted a report on one of the interviews as well as a summary file referencing the woman’s allegations against Trump.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, pushed back against the allegations in a statement Friday.
“The total baselessness of these accusations is also supported by the obvious fact that Joe Biden’s [Justice Department] knew about them for four years and did nothing with them – because they knew President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong,” Leavitt said.
“As we have said countless times, President Trump has been totally exonerated by the release of the Epstein Files.”
The Justice Department this week said it had “not deleted any files from the library,” and a spokeswoman called it “the most transparent Department of Justice in history.”
In addition to the FBI interviews, the Justice Department said on Thursday that federal officials in South Florida had separately concluded that five prosecution memos “initially marked as privileged could be released while still protecting the privileged materials.” Those were also released, the agency said.
The release of the FBI interviews and other documents came a day after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted to subpoena Attorney-General Pam Bondi, escalating tensions between Congress and the administration.
Bondi, testifying last month before Congress, said the Justice Department “spent thousands of hours painstakingly reviewing millions of pages to comply with Congress’s law.”
It was not clear how Bondi intends to respond to the subpoena, which compels her to appear before the committee for a closed-door deposition about the Justice Department’s release of the Epstein records.
Amy Brittain, Kadia Goba, Jeremy Roebuck and Perry Stein contributed to this report.
Washington Post
