Felixnews.com – The United States Department of Justice has released millions of documents related to the investigation of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
According to the NY Times, a number of important documents related to allegations made by a woman against US President Donald Trump were reportedly not published.
American media reports state that the missing documents include an FBI memo summarizing an investigator’s interview with a woman who, in 2019, claimed to have been a victim of sexual assault by Epstein and Trump when she was a minor.
The memo is actually listed in the index of published investigative documents. The list states that the FBI conducted four interviews related to the woman’s confession and produced summaries for each interview.
However, the Department of Justice only released one interview summary containing allegations against Epstein. The other three memos were not included in the declassified documents.
Furthermore, the original interview notes, which the index states are also part of the investigative file, were not released. Similar notes were released in the interview files of witnesses and other victims in the Epstein case.
The Department of Justice stated that the unreleased documents likely fall under the category of protected material or duplicates. In a separate statement, agency officials also stated that some documents may have been withheld due to their relevance to the ongoing federal investigation.
However, officials did not specify why the memo related to the woman’s confession was not released.
The Department of Justice later stated that it was reviewing the released documents and would release additional files if it discovered documents that should have been made public.
Allegations Against Trump
The woman’s account is among a number of unverified allegations against high-profile figures that have emerged in millions of Epstein-related documents.
When the documents were first released last month, US officials stated that the files contained all the material submitted by the public to the FBI. They also said some of the documents contained sensational claims that were not necessarily true.
Trump himself has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson stated that Trump has been fully exonerated of any charges related to Epstein.
Meanwhile, lawyers who previously represented the women in lawsuits against Epstein’s assets declined to comment.
The absence of these documents raises questions about the Justice Department’s process for releasing the Epstein investigation files.
The release of the documents was carried out under a law Trump signed last year after bipartisan pressure from Congress.
The law allows the Justice Department to redact sections that could reveal the identity of victims, depict abuse, child sexual exploitation, or potentially interfere with ongoing federal investigations.
However, the law expressly prohibits the government from withholding or redacting documents solely for reasons of embarrassment, reputation, or political sensitivity of a public figure.
Several lawmakers and Epstein survivors have strongly criticized the government’s release of the documents. They argue that some sensitive information was not redacted, while other sections related to allegations against certain figures were blacked out or omitted.
Chronology of the victim’s statement
The woman who accused Trump first came forward in July 2019, days after Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges.
In one of the published FBI interview summaries, the woman said she was repeatedly sexually abused by Epstein as a teenager in the 1980s.
The FBI then conducted three additional interviews in August and October 2019 to assess her account. However, summaries of those interviews were not included in the publicly released documents.
The available files do contain a memo from 2005 in which the woman claims she was introduced to Trump by Epstein.
She also accused Trump of sexually assaulting her during a meeting in the mid-1980s when she was between 13 and 15 years old.
However, the released documents do not include an FBI assessment of the credibility of the account.
A search of the document’s page serial numbers indicates that more than 50 pages of investigative material related to the woman’s account are likely missing from the published files.
US Representative Robert Garcia stated that the documents were also not found in the unredacted files he reviewed directly at the Justice Department.
According to Garcia, several documents listed in the index and referenced in other files were missing.
He also said the Justice Department has not provided an adequate explanation for the missing documents. Democrats in Congress plan to launch a separate investigation into the matter.