Washington — The Justice Department released additional Jeffrey Epstein files Thursday that included uncorroborated accusations by a woman against President Trump that the department said had been mistakenly withheld during an earlier review.
The department said last week that it was working to determine if any records were improperly withheld after several news organizations reported that the massive tranche of records that had been made public didn’t include some files documenting a series of interviews conducted in 2019 with a woman who made an allegation against Mr. Trump.
The accuser was interviewed by the FBI four times as it sought to assess her account but a summary of only one of those interviews had been included in the publicly released files.
On Thursday, the department said those files had been “incorrectly coded as duplicative” and therefore were inadvertently not published along with other investigative documents related to the disgraced financier, who killed himself while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019.
“As we have consistently done, if any member of the public reported concerns with information in the library, the department would review, make any corrections, and republish online,” the department said in a post on X.
Mr. Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. The department noted in January that some of the documents contain “untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election.”
The new disclosures come as Attorney General Pam Bondi faces continued criticism over the department’s handling of the files released under a law passed by Congress after months of public and political pressure. Five Republicans on the House Oversight Committee joined Democrats in voting Wednesday to subpoena Bondi, demanding that she answer questions under oath in a sign of mounting frustration among members of the president’s own party.
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The Trump administration has faced constant political headaches over the Epstein files since the rollout of the files began in December, with critics accusing the department of hiding certain documents, over-redacting files, or in some cases, not redacting enough. In some cases, the department inadvertently released nude photos showing the faces of potential possible victims as well as names, email addresses and other identifying information that was either unredacted or not fully obscured.
Department officials have defended their handling of the files, saying they took pains to release them as quickly as possible under the law while also protecting victims. Department officials have said errors were inevitable given the volume of material, the number of lawyers viewing the files and the speed at which the department had to release them. The department has said it’s entitled to withhold records that exposed potential abuse victims, were duplicates or protected by legal privileges, or related to an ongoing criminal investigation.
Some of the records published Thursday pertained to a woman who contacted the FBI shortly after Epstein’s 2019 arrest and claimed that a man named “Jeff” living in Hilton Head, South Carolina, had raped her there in the 1980s when she was around 13 years old. The woman told the agents she didn’t know the man’s identity at the time but decades later concluded he was Jeffrey Epstein when a friend texted her his photo from a news story.
In a follow-up interview a month later, the woman added a host of other claims, including that Epstein had schemed to have her mother sent to prison, beaten her, arranged sexual encounters with other men and once flew her to either New Jersey or New York, where she alleged she bit Donald Trump after he tried to sexually assault her.
Agents spoke with the woman two more times, at one point asking her to provide more detail on her alleged interactions with Mr. Trump, but reported that she declined to answer additional questions and broke off contact. There’s no indication that Epstein ever lived in South Carolina and it was unclear whether Mr. Trump and Epstein knew each other during the time period involved.
The woman’s report was one of a number of uncorroborated reports that federal agents received from members of the public alleging misconduct by Mr. Trump and other famous people in the months and years after Epstein’s arrest.
Separately, it has emerged that the Justice Department has been taking down files on Epstein it had released. After removing tens of thousands of files, the department currently makes public about 2.7 million pages of documents related to Epstein, a CBS News analysis found, a number below the Department’s initial claim of 3 million and which continues to fluctuate.
