The US Department of Justice on Thursday released new documents related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including previously withheld FBI reports containing uncorroborated allegations that Donald Trump sexually assaulted a minor decades ago.
The latest released documents include three FBI interrogation reports from 2019 with a woman who claimed Epstein introduced her to the future US president in the 1980s, when she was between 13 and 15 years old.
According to interview summaries, known as FBI 302 reports, the woman alleged that Trump tried to force her to perform oral sex during a meeting arranged by Epstein.
The woman claimed she bit Trump during the incident and that he punched her before ordering her out of the room.
The documents do not indicate whether investigators found his account credible, and Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
Epstein, a New York financier who pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution and died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex crime charges, had long-standing ties to political and business elites.
Congress passed a law late last year requiring the government to release millions of files related to the Epstein case.
Justice Department officials noted that these latest documents were not released earlier this year because they had been mistakenly classified as duplicates.
The material published on Thursday includes summaries of four interviews conducted by the FBI with the woman between July and October 2019, after Epstein’s arrest.
The complainant alleged that Epstein had sexually abused her on multiple occasions and arranged meetings with other men.
Concealment?
In a subsequent interview, agents asked her for more details about the alleged interaction with Trump, but she refused to explain further and eventually stopped contacting investigators.
The Justice Department has warned that Epstein’s files contain “false and sensational claims” made by members of the public, especially in the period after the financier’s arrest.
“These are completely unfounded accusations, without any credible evidence to support them, made by a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
“The complete baselessness of these accusations is also supported by the obvious fact that Joe Biden’s Justice Department had known about them for four years and did nothing about them, because they knew that President Trump had done absolutely nothing wrong,” he added.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, charged with overseeing the release of the files, charge that the government is withholding key documents.
This week, the committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the department’s handling of the records, in a rare show of bipartisan frustration that included support from several Republicans.
The panel’s top Democrat, Robert Garcia, noted that the Justice Department announced the latest release a day after the Bondi vote.
“This is after they removed 50,000 files without explanation,” he posted on X. “Let’s put an end to this White House cover-up.”
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