The Justice Department added files to its public Epstein Library on Thursday recounting an unsubstantiated allegation against President Donald Trump.
The files memorialize interviews with a woman who spoke to FBI agents several times in 2019, after the federal government had charged Jeffrey Epstein with sex-trafficking crimes. The woman described an encounter with Trump in the early 1980s, when she was a minor, in which she said he sexually assaulted her.
The files had previously been missing from the database Congress forced the Justice Department to create this year. The department said last week it was considering whether to add them.
In one of the new FBI documents, the woman describes her supposed encounter with Trump. In another, she described mysterious, seemingly threatening phone calls she received for years after suffering abuse at the hands of Epstein and his associates, plus several instances she described as “close calls,” including one in which she was driving and another car tried to run her off the road.
Trump said in 2002 he’d known Epstein for 15 years, suggesting they’d met in the late 1980s, not the early 1980s when the alleged abuse took place. Police started investigating Epstein’s sex crimes in the mid-2000s.
The Guardian, which obtained the missing FBI documents last week, said it uncovered the woman’s identity and discovered she’s repeatedly been charged with fraud and theft. And Epstein’s brother told the paper he didn’t vacation in South Carolina, where the woman claimed to have met him.
Reporters and members of Congress had noticed the serial numbers for the missing files on a list of FBI documents that had been provided to the legal team for Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, during her criminal trial after Epstein’s death.
The Justice Department said Thursday that thanks to public feedback, it discovered 15 documents had been mistakenly flagged as “duplicative.”
“As we have consistently done, if any member of the public reported concerns with information in the library, the Department would review, make any corrections, and republish online,” the department said on social media.
The new disclosure occurred one day after the House Oversight Committee voted in bipartisan fashion to subpoena U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi over the department’s failure to make public its entire Epstein archive as required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law Congress passed last year.
Not all of the missing documents had been uploaded as of Thursday evening. Some, labeled as “interview notes,” still didn’t turn up when HuffPost searched their serial numbers from the witness list. The available documents don’t say what the FBI thought of the woman’s allegations.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), one of the lawmakers who confirmed the documents were missing from the Epstein Library, posted links to the files on Thursday evening.
She said, “Time to subpoena Trump.”
