Justice
Dept. Releases Missing Interviews With Woman Who Made Claims Against Trump
The pages
had been withheld from the trove of documents related to the convicted sex
offender Jeffrey Epstein because of what officials called a mistaken
determination that they were duplicates.
Devlin
Barrett
By Devlin
Barrett
Reporting
from Washington
March 5,
2026
The
Justice Department released F.B.I. documents on Thursday describing several
interviews with a woman who made an accusation against President Trump. The
pages had been previously withheld from the vast trove of documents related to
the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein because of what officials called a
mistaken determination that they were duplicates.
The
typewritten notes recounted multiple interviews the F.B.I. conducted in 2019
with the woman, who said she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Epstein
and Mr. Trump. She came forward shortly after Mr. Epstein was arrested that
summer on charges of federal sex trafficking.
Her
accusations against Mr. Trump date back to the 1980s, when she was a teenager.
Her description of being assaulted by Mr. Trump is among a number of
uncorroborated accusations against well-known men, including the president,
contained in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department.
The
department had already released documents describing the existence of the memos
released Thursday, indicating that the F.B.I. had conducted four interviews
related to her claims and had written summaries of each conversation. But only
one of those interviews, in which she described being assaulted by Mr. Epstein,
appeared to be included in the initial release, raising questions about why the
remaining three were missing. Initially, officials said they were duplicates
that had been released elsewhere, but a follow-up review determined that was
not correct, officials said.
The
absence of the memos further fueled criticism from some lawmakers and victims
that the Trump administration had bungled its responsibility under the law. The
Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed in November by Congress, required the
government to release all of the investigative files related to Mr. Epstein,
without revealing identifying information about his victims.
In a
statement posted online on Thursday, the Justice Department acknowledged that
besides those F.B.I. memos, it had also identified about a dozen other
documents that were “incorrectly coded as duplicative.” In addition, federal
prosecutors in Florida determined that five prosecution memos initially marked
as privileged could be released with redactions, the department said.
When the
files were made public in late January, officials described the trove as
including all material sent by the public to the F.B.I. and acknowledged that
extended to uncorroborated assertions. “Some of the documents contain untrue
and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the
F.B.I. right before the 2020 election,” the department said in a statement at
the time, calling such claims “unfounded and false.”
Devlin
Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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