Following revelations that the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice did not contain the summaries of a set of interviews the FBI conducted with a woman who alleged that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager, DOJ made the documents available on Thursday.
The disclosures not only raise new questions about the president’s conduct and whether he was aware of or participated in the crimes his erstwhile pal Jeffrey Epstein had committed, but also about why these interview notes were omitted from the millions of documents DOJ was forced to release last year after Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The interviews were conducted in 2019 and detail events that happened more than 30 years prior.
The most salacious document includes the woman’s description of an encounter she had with Trump when she was between 13 and 15 years old and Epstein “drove her and/or flew her to either New York or New Jersey.”
There, according to the interview notes, also called 302s, she was left in a room with the man who is now the president of the United States. The woman, who indicated in a later interview that she was involved in a civil case regarding her abuse, said that Trump “unzipped his pants and put [her] head down to his penis.”
She told the FBI agent that he then struck her when she bit his penis.
Now, we have no way of establishing whether her account is true.
On the one hand, there are a lot of details that are missing or vague, which could be explained by the time that has lapsed from the time of the alleged assault, the traumatic nature of sexual abuse, and the age of the victim at the time.
On the other hand, her description of her encounters with Epstein matches the accounts of other victims. In addition, independent journalist Roger Sollenberger, who first revealed that the interview notes detailing the accusations against Trump were missing, reported that her civil suit against the Epstein Estate was settled in 2021.
What we do know is this: The president’s claims of having been “exonerated” are false based on the documents that have been released. And House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) may want to rethink whether he wants to keep parroting that statement.
At a minimum, nobody can claim anymore that Trump wasn’t implicated at all in the Epstein files. He clearly was, and there is no explanation yet as to what came after these interviews. Was there an investigation? And, if so, what did it find?
And the president, whose behavior when it comes to anything related to the Epstein files has raised eyebrows (to say the least), isn’t the only one who owes the country some answers.
It certainly seems curious (and very convenient) that DOJ somehow did not publish the three documents related to that accusation (here is the last one, and here is one in which the woman talks about her first encounters with Epstein and briefly mentions Trump) and only did so once Sollenberger and others reported that they were missing.
The department’s explanation is lacking.
“As we have consistently done, if any member of the public reported concerns with information in the library, the Department would review, make any corrections, and republish online,” DOJ said. “What we found through extensive review is that a published 302 — additionally disclosed in a published spreadsheet — had subsequent 302s that were coded as ‘duplicative.’ After this was brought to our attention, we reviewed the entire batch with the similar coding and discovered 15 documents were incorrectly coded as duplicative.”
Clearly, the public deserves more answers from Trump and DOJ.
As for the latter, these may be forthcoming.
On Wednesday, five Republicans of the Oversight Committee joined all Democrats and voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi and force her to testify about her department’s handling of the Epstein files and their release.
If you are wondering, Comer was not among those Republicans and had tried to convince his colleagues not to subpoena Bondi.
