National Public Radio and CNN, as well as other media outlets, reported Tuesday that dozens of FBI witness interview records have been withheld by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in its massive document dump last month. Several of these documents identify Donald Trump as engaging in the sexual abuse of teenage girls some 35 years ago.
The White House and DOJ have repeatedly cited the release of more than three million documents as satisfying the demands of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress in December. But an evidence log provided to attorneys for Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021 listed more than 90 witness interview records that were not released by the DOJ.
It is not clear whether the missing records are actually in the document dump, but not yet located by researchers because file numbers or other identifying markers are deleted or redacted, or whether the records were removed from the files entirely.
NPR, which was first to report on the missing documents, said that more than 50 pages of notes and memos based on the FBI interviews were not on the DOJ’s searchable database of Epstein documents. Witness interviews are documented by the FBI in what are called 302 memos, each with a unique number, while evidence logs list interviews in numerical order.
One victim who spoke with CNN, Jess Michaels, said, “All of us have been looking for our victim statements,” only to find nothing in the DOJ release. The absence of these documents meant that “this Department of Justice is actually gaslighting the entire country,” she said.
According to CNN, the withheld documents included “three interviews related to a woman who accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her decades ago.” The woman told the FBI that Epstein had begun abusing her when she was about 13 years old, and that Trump had also sexually assaulted her.
The events described took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the woman—variously identified as JE, Jane, or Jane Doe #4—responded to an ad to babysit at Epstein’s Hilton Head, South Carolina home. Epstein has no children. According to the witness, she was abused by Epstein in South Carolina, then taken to New York City where she was abused by a number of other men, associates of Epstein, one of whom was Donald Trump.
The unidentified woman gave her account in three separate interviews with the FBI in 2019, during the first Trump administration, when both the FBI and DOJ were controlled by Trump appointees. The FBI did not pursue her allegations.
Democratic Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Epstein investigation, told CNN, “We have a survivor that made serious allegations against the president … But there’s a series of documents, and it would appear to be possible interviews, that the FBI conducted with the survivor that are actually missing, that we don’t have access to.”
“Covering up direct evidence of a potential assault by the President of the United States is the most serious possible crime in this White House cover-up,” he said.
The White House responded to the media reports with typical bluster. Spokesperson Abigail Jackson told NPR, “just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.” She claimed that in releasing documents, and “calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democratic friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”
“Meanwhile,” Jackson continued, “Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries and Stacey Plaskett have yet to explain why they were soliciting money and meetings from Epstein after he was a convicted sex offender.”
The last comment is tied in with the next stage of the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee investigation: closed-door depositions to be taken from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday, and from former President Bill Clinton on Friday.
Trump has sought to offset revelations of his close relationship with Epstein, in the course of two decades, by citing equally close ties between the convicted sex offender and financial operator with prominent Democrats, most notably Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and former US Senator George Mitchell.
In truth, Epstein’s financial and sexual services were on offer to the financial oligarchy as a whole, not just in the United States, but in Europe and Israel as well, as the arrests of former Prince Andrew and former British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson have made clear. Former Israeli Premier Ehud Barak was a frequent Epstein guest, and there have been widespread reports that Epstein acted as an Israeli intelligence asset.
New details of sexual abuse and new names of Epstein’s associates continue to come to light as researchers pore through the millions of pages of documents. Resignations and “apologies” continue as those named as Epstein’s associates are exposed. Very few have acknowledged any connection to Epstein’s sex-trafficking; most commonly, they admit to continuing financial consultation or socializing with Epstein after his first conviction in 2008 for solicitation of a minor for prostitution.
Summers, former Harvard president, announced he will resign from his position on the university’s faculty at the end of the academic year, while remaining on leave until then. Harvard cited its review of his ties to Epstein as the reason.
Richard Axel, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, resigned as co-director of Columbia University’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, saying his past association with Epstein was a “serious error in judgment.”
Billionaire Bill Gates held a town hall meeting with the staff of his Gates Foundation, at which he apologized for his relationship to Epstein, while claiming, “I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit,” according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. But Gates acknowledged that he first met Epstein in 2011—three years after Epstein’s guilty plea for solicitation—and subsequently spent time with him in New York, Washington, France and Germany.
A further source of information surfaced Monday with the report that Epstein was the subject of a five-year-long investigation by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). A 2015 Department of Justice document, 69 pages long, lists Epstein among 15 individuals targeted by the probe. “DEA reporting indicates the above individuals are involved in illegitimate wire transfers which are tied to illicit drug and/or prostitution activities occurring in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City,” the document says.
The DEA probe, first reported by CBS news, began on December 17, 2010, during the Obama administration, two years after Epstein pled guilty to one count of sex trafficking in Florida, in a sweetheart deal approved under the Bush administration. The final case against Epstein was begun in 2018 under the Trump administration and ended with his arrest in July 2019 and his death a month later in a Manhattan federal jail cell.
According to the CBS report, the DEA document reveals the existence of at least four other federal investigations into Epstein: three by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), dated 2006-2008, 2009-2010, and 2013; and one by the FBI, begun in 2006 and still open in 2015.
Thus at least three administrations, two Republican and one Democratic, had ample knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activities. Yet the financial wheeler-dealer remained a fixture in billionaire circles in Manhattan, Palm Beach and overseas.