DOJ Releases Epstein Files With Accusation Against Trump

The Justice Department on Thursday released additional Jeffrey Epstein files involving accusations made by a woman against President Trump that it said had been mistakenly withheld during an earlier review. The DOJ said last week that it was working to determine if any records were improperly withheld after several news organizations reported that the massive tranche of records that had been made public didn't include some files documenting a series of interviews conducted in 2019 with a woman who made an allegation against Trump. The accuser was interviewed by the FBI four times, the AP reports, but a summary of only one of those interviews had been included in the publicly released files.

On Thursday, the department said the files had been "incorrectly coded as duplicative," and therefore were inadvertently not published along with other investigative documents related to the convicted sex offender, who killed himself while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019. "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," the department said in a post on X. Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.

Some of the new records published Thursday pertained to a woman who contacted the FBI shortly after Epstein's 2019 arrest and claimed that a man named Jeff living in Hilton Head, South Carolina, had raped her there in the 1980s when she was around 13 years old. The woman told the agents she didn't know the man's identity at the time but decades later concluded he was Jeffrey Epstein when a friend texted her his photo from a news story, per the AP. In an interview a month later, the woman added other claims, including that Epstein had schemed to have her mother sent to prison, beaten her, arranged sexual encounters with other men and once flew her to either New Jersey or New York, where she said she bit Trump after he tried to sexually assault her.