Kamal Ghorui
WASHINGTON: The Department of Justice (DoJ) released FBI documents Thursday describing several interviews with a woman who made an accusation against President Trump. The pages had been withheld from the vast trove of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein because of what officials called a mistaken determination that they were duplicates.The notes recounted multiple interviews the FBI conducted in 2019 with the woman, who said she had been sexually assaulted by both Epstein and Trump. She came forward shortly after Epstein was arrested on charges of federal sex trafficking. Her accusations date back to the 1980s, when she was a teenager.
The department had already released documents describing the existence of the memos released Thursday, indicating that the FBI 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 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 fuelled criticism from some lawmakers and victims that the Trump administration had bungled its responsibility under the law. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed in Nov by Congress, required govt to release all of the files related to Epstein.The justice department acknowledged that besides those FBI memos, it had also identified about a dozen other documents that were “incorrectly coded as duplicative”. In addition, prosecutors determined that five prosecution memos marked as privileged could be released with redactions, the department said.
