DOJ Releases Missing Interviews With Woman Who Made Claims Against Trump in Epstein Files

The pages had been withheld from the trove of documents related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein because of what officials called a mistaken determination that they were duplicates.

The Justice Department released F.B.I. documents on Thursday describing several interviews with a woman who made an accusation against President Trump. The pages had been previously withheld from the vast trove of documents related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein because of what officials called a mistaken determination that they were duplicates.

The typewritten notes recounted multiple interviews the F.B.I. conducted in 2019 with the woman, who said she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump. She came forward shortly after Mr. Epstein was arrested that summer on charges of federal sex trafficking.

Her accusations against Mr. Trump date back to the 1980s, when she was a teenager. Her description of being assaulted by Mr. Trump is among a number of uncorroborated accusations against well-known men, including the president, contained in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department.

The department had already released documents describing the existence of the memos released Thursday, indicating that the F.B.I. had conducted four interviews related to her claims and had written summaries of each conversation. But only one of those interviews, in which she described being assaulted by Mr. Epstein, appeared to be included in the initial release, raising questions about why the remaining three were missing. Initially, officials said they were duplicates that had been released elsewhere, but a follow-up review determined that was not correct, officials said.

The absence of the memos further fueled criticism from some lawmakers and victims that the Trump administration had bungled its responsibility under the law. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed in November by Congress, required the government to release all of the investigative files related to Mr. Epstein, without revealing identifying information about his victims.

In a statement posted online on Thursday, the Justice Department acknowledged that besides those F.B.I. memos, it had also identified about a dozen other documents that were “incorrectly coded as duplicative.” In addition, federal prosecutors in Florida determined that five prosecution memos initially marked as privileged could be released with redactions, the department said.

When the files were made public in late January, officials described the trove as including all material sent by the public to the F.B.I. and acknowledged that extended to uncorroborated assertions. “Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the F.B.I. right before the 2020 election,” the department said in a statement at the time, calling such claims “unfounded and false.”

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