The US Department of Justice released this Friday, 6, FBI documents describing interviews with a woman who made an accusation against Donald Trump. The pages had been withheld from the vast set of files linked to , convicted of sexual crimes. The argument was that the documents retained were duplicates.
Among the documents released yesterday were three memos about interviews with a woman who told agents that Epstein had repeatedly physically and sexually abused her decades ago when she was 13 years old. She also accused Trump of sexual assault.
FBI agents conducted four interviews with the woman, but only one, conducted in July 2019, was available in the Department of Justice’s database, released in January. In this only released statement, she alleges that she was repeatedly abused by Epstein when she was a minor and lived in South Carolina. She does not mention Trump in the interview.
The omission of the other three interviews raised even more suspicions that the White House was covering up crimes. The files released yesterday contain the three missing statements, carried out in August and October 2019.
In the second interview, the woman described other abuses committed by Epstein and several of his male friends. She said Epstein took her to New York and New Jersey when she was between the ages of 13 and 15, and led her to a “very tall building.” There, according to her, Epstein introduced her to Trump.
Suspicions
At the time, according to the testimony, Trump asked everyone to leave the room where they were gathered and, according to the woman’s account, “he said something like: ‘Let me teach you how little girls should behave’.” Then he unzipped his pants and placed her head “on his penis.” The woman then reported that she bit Trump, who then attacked her and said something like: “Get this little bitch out of here.”
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Later in the same interview, the woman told agents that she heard Trump and Epstein talking about how the financier blackmailed people and heard Trump “talking about how he laundered money in his casinos.”
Threats
In the third interview, three weeks later, agents noted that she said she had received threatening phone calls that she said were related to Epstein or Trump, as well as several incidents in which she “almost got hit” by cars.
During the fourth interview – two months after her last statement to the FBI – the woman was not accompanied by a lawyer, unlike previous meetings. She told officers she felt uncomfortable being recorded and questioned the usefulness of the statements.
It’s unclear what happened to the FBI’s investigation into the allegations. An email exchanged between FBI agents, included in the Justice Department files, mentions “an identified victim who claimed to have been abused by Trump, but ended up refusing to cooperate”, without specifying whether it is the same person.
Initially, authorities had justified omitting the interviews by saying that they were duplicate files or had already been leaked elsewhere. However, a later review determined that this was not what happened.
Reviews
The omission of the memos further fueled criticism from some lawmakers and victims that the Trump administration had neglected its legal responsibility. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed in November by Congress, requires the government to release all investigative files related to the case, without revealing information that would identify his victims.
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In a statement published online Thursday, the Justice Department acknowledged that in addition to these FBI memos, it identified about a dozen other documents that had been “incorrectly coded as duplicates.”
Additionally, federal prosecutors in Florida determined that five charging memos, initially classified as confidential, could be released with portions blacked out, according to the department. Trump denies any wrongdoing and claims that Epstein’s files “completely exonerate” him.
Justice Department officials have also been criticized for their handling of the files, including inconsistent redactions that exposed dozens of victims and initially withheld the names of prominent men.
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The department this week republished a series of thousands of documents that were taken down after officials discovered that a batch of them contained many nude images. A source said they were temporarily removed as a precaution and would be reviewed and then republished. (WITH INTERNATIONAL AGENCIES)
