Washington (USA), 25 Feb. (LaPresse) – In the more than three million pages of documents on Jeffrey Epstein released by the Department of Justice in January, some materials relating to a woman who had made an allegation against President Donald Trump are missing. This emerges from an analysis by the New York Times, following a similar report by the radio network NPR.
The missing documents include FBI memoranda summarizing interviews conducted regarding statements made in 2019 by a woman who came forward after Epstein’s arrest, claiming she had been sexually assaulted both by Trump and the financier decades earlier, when she was a minor. The existence of these memoranda was revealed by an index listing investigative materials related to the woman’s account, which has been made public. According to this index, the FBI conducted four interviews related to the woman’s claims and prepared summaries for each. However, only one summary of the four interviews—a document describing the allegations against Epstein—was published by the Department of Justice. The other three are missing.
The released files also do not include the underlying interview notes, which the index indicates as part of the file. The Department of Justice has, however, published notes from similar interviews with other potential witnesses and victims. It is unclear why the materials are missing. On Monday, the Department told the Times that “the only materials withheld were confidential or duplicates.” In a new statement on Tuesday, the Department also noted that the documents might have been withheld due to “an ongoing federal investigation.” Officials did not directly explain why the memoranda related to the woman’s allegations were not released. The woman’s account of an alleged assault by Trump in the 1980s is among numerous uncorroborated allegations against prominent men, including the president, contained in the millions of documents released by the Department of Justice.