On Trump Accuser Files, DOJ Establishes Pattern of Obstruction

Over the last two weeks, numerous outlets confirmed my reporting that the Justice Department had withheld records, in defiance of federal law, documenting the FBI’s interactions with a woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was a child. While the DOJ eventually released three interview reports that it had withheld, the department has exhibited an ongoing pattern of obstructing the public’s legal right to these documents, and has yet to release 70 percent of the pages it withheld related to this woman — along with other potentially critical records.

It seems like a good time to take stock of where this story is and where it may go from here. I’ll also explain what DOJ still has not released and will unpack their ultimately baseless excuses for defying and continuing to defy the law.

The fundamental story has three basic points:

• The FBI interviewed the Trump accuser — who DOJ identifies as a Jeffrey Epstein victim — at least four times in 2019, under penalty of law for lying;

• DOJ found her credible, with an internal FBI email last summer revealing the FBI wanted this woman to cooperate with them on an investigation into her Trump accusation, but she declined; and

• DOJ withheld records of these events from the public, breaking the federal law requiring their release.

The public pressure in response to the reporting was enough to eventually force the DOJ to release three FBI interview reports that they’d withheld. A review of the files shows the DOJ is still withholding multiple records related to this woman, including, as NPR’s Stephen Fowler reported, 37 pages of FBI field notes that informed the interview reports, and any notes associated with the fourth interview.

But there seem to be other missing records. One of these documents is a previously unreported Epstein file case index, which was circulated internally as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet as recently as last summer and attached to this July 22, 2025, FBI email discussing the woman’s allegations. This updated index from July should capture all serial numbers across the full Epstein case file, and it may also include final disposition notes for witnesses like the Trump accuser. However, this spreadsheet file doesn’t appear to have been released publicly.

In response to the public’s demands for transparency in accordance with law, the DOJ has released statements that dissemble the facts and confuse the simple issues at hand. They haven’t published a clear and coherent explanation, and I will unpack and disambiguate their statements later in this piece just so everyone is clear about what’s actually going on here.

I’d also like to flag a critical underlying element that has gone unmentioned in reporting to date: The DOJ Office of Legal Counsel guidance that the government may investigate a sitting president for potential crimes, but cannot even contemplate charges while the president is in office. This issue was front and center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Trump’s ties to Russia and his sundry efforts to obstruct that investigation. The parameters of the OLC guidance were made clear in the Mueller Report, which was published just a few months before Epstein’s arrest in July 2019, when this woman came forward. It’s all but certain this issue came up internally when the FBI sought to investigate her accusations against Trump, but we haven’t seen any records of those discussions.

Here’s a breakdown in bullet points of what we have, what we still don’t have, and what other non-public records likely exist.

Maxwell and the public have:

-Interviews 1, 2, 3, and 4 (these interview reports are called “302” forms; this is a total 25 pages)

-Various records and memos associated with the accuser’s intake process and communications with the FBI

-Three photos she provided to the FBI in the course of her interviews

Maxwell has, but we don’t:

-Field notes associated with interviews 1, 2, and 3 (these are contemporaneous agent notes and are separate from the official 302 writeups; they total 37 pages, and none of them have been released publicly)

-A driver’s license report

-The FBI’s 2019 background check on the accuser

Missing entirely:

-Field notes for interview 4 (this 302 was drafted 5 days after the interview; the 302 quotes her directly; she also declined to be recorded; there are almost certainly field notes affiliated with this final interview)

- Any memorialization of the FBI’s final disposition closing her case; this should also exist somewhere, but we don’t have it

-All versions of the FBI’s “updated case index” spreadsheet

Potential records:

-Any other interviews with her or other witnesses, or any evidence the FBI gathered while investigating her case

-Additional internal communications about her case, including any FBI emails at the time as well as any discussion of procedural hurdles — most specifically the OLC guidance that DOJ cannot consider a charging decision against a sitting president

What’s next

First, let’s back up a bit. About three weeks ago, I first reported that the Epstein files contain evidence that in 2019, the FBI interviewed a woman who accused Trump of sexually and physically assaulting her when she was a child.

I then first reported that the DOJ had deleted a document from the Epstein database definitively showing:

• that the FBI interviewed this woman not just once, but at least four times;

• that the DOJ had provided four of her interviews to Maxwell as part of the discovery process ahead of her 2021 trial; and

• that the DOJ had only released the first of those four interviews to the public, withholding three of them in defiance of federal law.

In other words, this evidence index revealed that by not releasing all the interviews, as required by law, the DOJ let Maxwell retain damaging information — i.e., potential blackmail — on the current president. Days after I reported that the Justice Department had deleted the index, they restored the document. The DOJ later claimed they had removed the index for a redaction review, but that claim can’t be accepted without further substantiation from the DOJ, because the version on the site today appears identical to the version they had removed. (That is, DOJ didn’t add any new redactions or remove any old redactions.) Nothing came of this alleged redaction review, so before the public can accept the DOJ’s explanation, the DOJ needs to support it, such as by showing real-time communications. Without that justification, there’s no evidence beyond their own word that the Justice Department didn’t delete this document simply because it was problematic for the president and the DOJ’s ongoing dealings with Maxwell.

Then, last week, after pressure from the media, members of Congress, and the public, the DOJ released the three interviews. Reporting from Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald confirmed that the FBI had indeed found the woman to be a “credible” witness and “would not have interviewed her four times if they thought she was lying.” (While this seems obvious on its face, it is significant that a DOJ source confirmed it.)

I’ve independently corroborated a number of the biographical and historical claims the woman made to agents in her interviews, including unflattering claims about her mother’s criminal history and biographical details she provided about an alleged Epstein associate named Jim Atkins. The South Carolina Post and Courier published an impressive fact-check assessing these and other claims in her interviews.

However, as NPR’s Fowler first reported — then reported again after the release — at least 37 pages of materials related to this woman’s case have not been published. All 37 pages comprise FBI agent field notes associated with the first three interviews; former senior DOJ officials told me it’s all but certain there were also field notes for the fourth interview, though for whatever reason these were not turned over to Maxwell.

A DOJ spokesperson told The Daily Beast this week that the missing files Fowler identified were not missing, but were “duplicative notes, which contain the exact same information” as the interviews. While it’s true that the field notes may contain at least some of the “same information,” that doesn’t mean they’re wholly “duplicative” of the interviews. The field notes likely contain additional information, details, observations, context, procedural notes, or language that did not make it into the final 302 reports.

Again: Even if the content of the notes is genuinely identical to the 302s, the onus is on the DOJ to prove it, since their excuse for not releasing the interviews to begin with was — implausibly — that the DOJ incorrectly believed they were “duplicative.” (Obviously, there’s no harm in releasing duplicative material anyway; set the record straight.) On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the woman’s records would have undergone at least three points of review, including at the most senior level, so it is entirely unclear why the DOJ expects anybody would believe that the specifically most incriminating records about Trump were withheld because of an innocent clerical oversight.

But the focus isn’t narrow to those 37 pages. Former DOJ officials also told me it’s likely there are still other unreleased materials related to the woman’s case. The only reason we knew about the definite existence of her four interviews and the related field notes was because they were given to Maxwell and appeared on that (temporarily deleted) case index.

In fact, the Epstein files themselves show concretely that we appear to be missing at least one other document.

An internal FBI email last summer states that the Epstein case files show that “one identified victim claimed abuse by Trump but ultimately refused to cooperate.” Independent journalists Nina Burleigh and Kate Chenoweth first reported the existence of this email, which now seems like potentially the most significant document released in the Epstein files.

This email is significant because, as former senior DOJ officials told me, the language indicates the FBI wanted to pursue a criminal investigation of Trump based on this woman’s account. Further, these sources said, her ultimate decision not to cooperate in that effort would almost certainly have been memorialized somewhere. That FBI email from last summer — six years after her interviews — strongly indicates there is indeed an official record of her decision in the case files, and there should be some record of the FBI memorializing that in a final disposition. (The FBI’s clearance code for a refusal to cooperate is “D.”)

We don’t know where that final disposition is memorialized. The DOJ has said recently that there are no ongoing investigations related to the Epstein case, which would mean they did close this file. Members of Congress, including Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) recently on ABC News, have expressed frustration about the DOJ’s stonewalling of similar records behind the “deliberative-process privilege.”

Even if there’s no record of that decision — or even if it was destroyed and cannot be produced — that email from last summer still shows we’re missing at least one additional document. That’s because there’s an attachment to that email: an Excel spreadsheet — “Updated_Case_Index_-_50D-NY3027571_-_UNREDACTED.xlsx” — which does not appear to have been included in the Epstein database. That file name also appears as an attachment in at least two FBI email chains from earlier in 2025, which were released with the Epstein files and can be found here and here.

Ultimately, however, the DOJ can produce all FBI records related to this woman, and they can produce them today. And — by the DOJ’s own admission in court three months ago — they could have produced them in December. Instead, DOJ has floated confusing explanations, blaming “duplicates” and the Maxwell case for any holdup.

But in December, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, told a federal judge that the duplicate problem really wasn’t a problem at all — that FBI files that predate the Maxwell case “were not themselves produced under the Protective Order, and thus are not Maxwell Protective Order Discovery Materials.” Those files — which contain this woman’s materials as well as numerous similar records from other Epstein witnesses — could have been processed and published no problem. And they still can be today.

Finally, the OLC guidance.

It’s unclear whether this woman understood or was even informed of the OLC opinion at the time. In fact, her fourth interview — which is curious for a number of reasons — shows that agents did not even correct her wrong assumption that the statute of limitations had lapsed on potential charges. (Child sex trafficking has no such federal limitations.)

The Mueller report states that after reviewing the DOJ guidelines, Mueller’s office “determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.” Mueller wrote that “a criminal investigation during the President’s term is permissible,” as are charges when a president leaves office, stating that his team “conducted a thorough factual investigation in order to preserve the evidence when memories were fresh and documentary materials were available.” This seems to be what the agents were getting at in their fourth interview, offer the woman a venue to share her “story,” while skirting the issue of potential charges.

The White House has pointed to the fact that no charges were filed against Trump when he left office. But it doesn’t seem like that was even on the table — the woman had already declined to cooperate with the FBI, in 2019.

More pointedly, however, biographical details about the accuser’s life after the 2020 election — specifically certain information about her brother, who, I first reported, was arrested for his participation in the Jan. 6 riot to keep Trump in power — would seem to offer a pretty damn good explanation for why this woman, who reported threats over the course of her life, wouldn’t have wanted to come forward.

While the White House has smeared the woman’s “extensive criminal history,” public records contradict that claim, as the Miami Herald also pointed out. Instead, the White House should be asked to comment on her brother.