DOJ Removed Record of Multiple FBI Interviews with Underage Trump Accuser, Epstein Data Shows
The FBI spoke at least four times with a woman who credibly accused Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was a minor, Epstein files show. That document is no longer accessible on the DOJ website.
On Sunday, I reported that the FBI interviewed a victim who accused President Donald Trump of sexually and violently assaulting her when she was 13-15 years old. I also reported that some of the Justice Department’s case files for this woman — who later sued and reportedly received a settlement from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate for sexual abuse allegations in the same timeframe — appear to be missing from the government’s publicly searchable Epstein database.
However, I have now found DOJ records showing that the FBI did not just interview this woman once. The FBI interviewed this woman — who claimed that Trump forced her to give him oral sex when she was in her early teens, then punched her in the head after she bit his penis and kicked her out — at least four times.
But the DOJ’s file associated with those records — a document cataloguing information that the government provided counsel for convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell during her trial — has apparently been removed.
This revelation adds to the mounting pile of evidence undermining statements from Attorney General Pam Bondi and other senior administration officials assuring the public that the Epstein file release has been transparent, complete, and bereft of any evidence implicating Trump in wrongdoing.
But my initial report also raised questions about files associated with the victim’s case number — 3501.045 — that do not appear to be in the Epstein database. In other words, the case seems to be incomplete.
Quick background on my first report about the accuser, if you need it; if not, feel free to skip this paragraph. My reporting showed the FBI found this woman’s allegations credible enough to warrant a formal interview, which she gave with her attorney present in July 2019 — and now, as I have just learned, credible enough for three other interviews. The woman’s attorney told agents in that first interview that she would only speak to them at the time about Epstein, and not any other people — including, by name, Donald Trump — specifying the reason as a “fear of retaliation.” But “credible” doesn’t mean the woman’s claims were verified, or even that they could be independently verified — which her initial interview suggests may be impossible, since she did not memorialize the abuse in writing when it happened to her, as early as age 13. And it doesn’t mean the DOJ believed it could seek charges because of her claims alone, especially since they’d need her to cooperate as a witness if they did want to bring charges. We don’t even know if the DOJ arrived at any final disposition regarding this woman’s allegations against the president. It just means the FBI found her to be credible in 2019, and six years later included her allegation as a bullet point in a comprehensive internal presentation about the Epstein and Maxwell case history, assembled last summer.
Today, I searched for the victim’s case in an AI-powered database (epstein-data.com) of files that have been downloaded at some point from the DOJ’s public released data. That turned up a document I hadn’t seen before, showing that the FBI conducted not one but four interviews with this victim. The four interviews took place in the summer of 2019, after the initial tip was given in the days following Epstein’s arrest. The document also accounts for FBI “interview notes” associated with three of those four interviews. Here’s a screenshot of the records.
The only reason the public can see that screenshot today is because in late January, this Epstein database document happened to get saved in the Wayback Machine, a webpage archiving service.
Here is the link to that archived record of the document.
The AI database also saved this file before the document was taken offline, and the database associates that file with a DOJ internet address. This is the address: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00095751.pdf
But as of this writing today, that address returns “page not found.”
However, thanks to the Internet Archive, the document does live on. Plug that address into the Wayback Machine, and you can read the document — a document the DOJ gave to Ghislaine Maxwell as part of their criminal case against her, but apparently no longer allows the public to see, despite the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a federal law stipulating the public release of the government’s records against Epstein and co-conspirator Maxwell.
Other manifests of witness statements in the Maxwell trial (known as “3500” material) begin with number 3502. (Basically different versions of this file.) The now-inaccessible spreadsheet catalogues “non-testifying witness material” that federal prosecutors provided to Maxwell’s defense in November 2021 — in other words, the government was telling Maxwell’s lawyers, “as part of our evidence-sharing duties in this case, here are materials related to witnesses we aren’t calling to testify against you.”
The Trump-Epstein accuser’s allegations cover roughly 1983-1985; Maxwell reportedly joined Epstein’s inner circle years later.
The interview timeline raises signifiant questions for Trump, his White House mouthpieces, and his hand-picked leaders at DOJ — Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Deputy Attorney General and former Trump criminal defense lawyer Todd Blanche, and former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, who announced he would return to his prior life as a podcast host when the Epstein files were first released in December. (Bongino officially departed before the largest, potentially final batch of files was dumped in late January.)
All of these officials have sought to distance and downplay Trump’s ties to the dead child predator, sometimes with unabashed, obvious lies and gleeful defiance. Before joining the Trump administration, Bondi, Patel, and Bongino had all advocated for the full release of the Epstein material.
But there’s more to question here.
On Feb. 27, Bondi made a big, public to-do on Fox News, claiming she and Patel had just been “surprised” to learn the FBI had “thousands of pages” of evidence in the Epstein case that they hadn’t turned over to her despite the bureau’s assurances they had provided all the available documents. She sent a letter to Patel at the time, ordering him to get to the bottom of it, and to deliver a report about his findings in two weeks. We don’t know what happened to that report.
The very next day, however, the DOJ returned to Trump troves of sensitive government documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving office in 2021. The White House at the time would not confirm whether Trump took all the documents back, or whether he allowed the government to retain some of them.
A master Epstein evidence manifest shows the government “acquired” at least four pieces of Epstein evidence in late February and March of last year. The first is dated as “acquired” on Feb. 27, the day Bondi went public about the additional files and ordered Patel to investigate. The other three are dated March 10, as the DOJ was carrying out its five-alarm, all-hands Epstein files review — and, reportedly, scrambling to find and flag all the references to Trump.
One last note about these FBI interviews with the Trump accuser.
As I reported on Sunday, her initial interview — the one that has been publicly released and is still accessible — was conducted July 24, 2019, then entered into the FBI’s case files on Aug. 9, the day before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell. FBI agents typically have a deadline of five working days to file their field interview write-ups; this was a 16-day gap.
But this new material, which is no longer accessible on the DOJ website, shows that the woman’s other formal FBI interviews took place Aug. 7, Aug. 20, and Oct. 16. That means she spoke to the FBI two days before her first interview had even been entered into her case file, and three days before Epstein was found dead in his prison cell. The fourth interview, on Oct. 16, is the only one not accompanied by interview notes in the Maxwell evidence record.