Justice Department releases missing FBI interviews in Epstein files with woman who made claims against Trump

By Brad Heath

WASHINGTON, March 5 (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department released FBI records on Thursday that summarize interviews of an unidentified woman in which she made accusations against President Donald Trump related to an alleged sexual encounter.

FBI agents interviewed the woman four times in 2019 as part of their investigation into accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The Justice Department had previously released a log confirming that the interviews took place but released a summary of only one of those four meetings, in which she accused Epstein of molesting her when she was a teenager. 

The newly disclosed records, which were posted on the department’s website on Thursday, show she also claimed Trump attempted to force her to perform oral sex after Epstein introduced her to the future president in New York or New Jersey in the 1980s when she was between 13 and 15 years old. 

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the disclosures. Politico, which first reported the disclosures, said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the woman’s claims “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence.”

The Justice Department has cautioned that some of the documents include “untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump.” Reuters could not independently confirm the accuracy of the woman’s allegations, and FBI records suggest agents stopped speaking with her in 2019.

The Justice Department said in a post on the social media platform X that the records it released Thursday were among 15 documents that it had “incorrectly coded as duplicative” and not published as a result. 

The disclosure comes as the Justice Department faces scrutiny in Congress over its handling of documents from the Epstein investigation, which it is required to make public. Democrats have accused Trump’s administration of concealing records related to Trump, and a committee in the House of Representatives voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi so lawmakers can question her about how the government is handling the disclosures.

Trump has said his association with Epstein ended in the mid-2000s and that he was never aware of the financier’s sexual abuse. Records previously released by the department show Trump flew several times on Epstein’s plane in the 1990s, which Trump has denied. After the financier was first accused of sexual misconduct, Trump called the police chief in Palm Beach to say that “everyone has known he’s been doing this,” according to an FBI interview record.

In the report of the woman’s final interview, conducted in October 2019, during Trump’s first presidency, agents asked whether she would be willing to provide more information about Trump. In response, the agent wrote, she “asked what the point would be of providing the information at this point in her life when there was a strong possibility nothing could be done about it.”

(Reporting by Brad Heath; editing by Amy Stevens and Lincoln Feast.)