Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump - The New York Times

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Documents released by the Justice Department briefly mention a woman’s unverified accusation that Donald J. Trump assaulted her in the 1980s, when she was a minor. But several memos related to her account are not in the files.

Feb. 25, 2026

When the Justice Department made files public late last month, officials said it included all material sent by the public to the F.B.I.Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

The vast trove of documents released by the Justice Department from its investigations into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein failed to include some key materials related to a woman who made an accusation against President Trump, according to a review by The New York Times.

The materials are F.B.I. memos summarizing interviews the bureau did in connection to claims made in 2019 by a woman who came forward after Mr. Epstein’s arrest to say she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Trump and the financier decades earlier, when she was a minor.

The existence of the memos was revealed in an index listing the investigative materials related to her account, which was publicly released. According to that index, the F.B.I. conducted four interviews in connection with her claims and wrote summaries about each one. But only one summary of the four interviews, which describes her accusations against Mr. Epstein, was released by the Justice Department. The other three are missing.

The public files also do not include the underlying interview notes, which the index also indicates are part of the file. The Justice Department released similar interview notes in connection to F.B.I. interviews with other potential witnesses and victims.

It is unclear why the materials are missing. The Justice Department said in a statement to The Times on Monday that “the only materials that have been withheld were either privileged or duplicates.” In a new statement on Tuesday, the department also noted that documents could have been withheld because of “an ongoing federal investigation.” Officials did not directly address why the memos related to the woman’s claim were not released.

The woman’s description of being assaulted by Mr. Trump in the 1980s is among a number of uncorroborated accusations against well-known men, including the president, that are contained in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department.

When the files were made public late last month, officials described the trove as including all material sent by the public to the F.B.I. “Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the F.B.I. right before the 2020 election,” the department said in a statement at the time, calling such claims “unfounded and false.”

Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. In a statement on Tuesday, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said Mr. Trump had “been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.”

A lawyer who previously represented the woman in a lawsuit against Mr. Epstein’s estate declined to comment.

The missing records deepen questions about how the Justice Department has handled the release of the Epstein files, which was mandated by a law signed by Mr. Trump last year after bipartisan congressional pressure.

Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, addressing reporters after the Justice Department released more Epstein files last month.J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

Under the law, the Justice Department can redact material that could be used to identify Mr. Epstein’s victims, depicted violence or child sexual abuse, or would hurt a continuing federal investigation. But the law expressly prohibited federal officials from withholding or redacting materials “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity” to public figures.

Some lawmakers and survivors of Mr. Epstein’s abuse have strongly condemned the department for how it handled redactions, noting that details identifying some victims were left exposed and nude photographs of young women were included in the public release, while material related to claims of abuse by other men had been heavily redacted.

The woman who made the accusation about Mr. Trump came forward in July 2019, days after federal investigators arrested Mr. Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, according to records in the public files of tips the F.B.I. received during that period. She claimed that she had been repeatedly assaulted by Mr. Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s, according to a summary of an F.B.I. interview with her on July 24, 2019.

The F.B.I. did three subsequent interviews to assess her account in August and October 2019 and made a summary of each interview, according to the index of records compiled in the case. But the memos describing those three interviews were not publicly released.

The public files do contain a 2025 description of her account, as well as other accusations against prominent men contained in the documents. In that 2025 memo, federal officials wrote that the woman had said that Mr. Epstein introduced her to Mr. Trump, and that she claimed Mr. Trump had assaulted her in a violent and lurid encounter. The documents say the alleged incident would have occurred in the mid-1980s when she was 13 to 15 years old, but they do not include any assessment by the F.B.I. about the credibility of her accusation.

The Times’s examination of a set of serial numbers on the individual pages in the public files suggests that more than 50 pages of investigative materials related to her claims are not in the publicly available files. The missing materials were reported earlier by the journalist Roger Sollenberger on Substack and by NPR.

Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that when he reviewed unredacted versions of the Epstein files at the Justice Department on Monday, interview summaries related to the woman’s claim were also missing from that trove.

“Documents that are listed, which should be included, which are referenced in other documents, are not in the files,” Mr. Garcia said. He added that the Justice Department had also not provided them to the Oversight Committee, which issued a subpoena last year for all of the Justice Department’s investigative material regarding Mr. Epstein.

Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that interview summaries related to the woman’s claim were also missing from a trove of unredacted files he reviewed on Monday.Heather Diehl/Getty Images

Mr. Garcia said the Justice Department had not provided a proper explanation for why the materials were missing. Democrats plan to open a separate investigation into why the documents are not available.

In the sole summary of the F.B.I. interview that was released, the woman told investigators that she did not know Mr. Epstein’s full identity until 2019, when a friend sent her a photograph of Mr. Epstein. She said she then recognized the person who she said had raped her.

The woman told the agents she still had the photo on her phone, and they noted that it was a widely distributed photo of Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump, according to the document. She gave the agents permission to take a photograph of the image but asked them to crop out Mr. Trump. When asked why, her lawyer interjected that the woman “was concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation,” according to the F.B.I. memo.

It is unclear exactly what F.B.I. agents learned about her claims related to Mr. Trump in their three subsequent interviews.

The woman spent most of the interview on July 24, 2019, describing in detail what she said were repeated violent assaults by Mr. Epstein that she had endured, as reported earlier by The Post and Courier. She said that as a teenager in South Carolina, she was asked to babysit at a house on Hilton Head Island. But after she arrived, there were no children to babysit, and only a man she came to know as Jeff who she said plied her with alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. She described him raping her on multiple occasions.

The woman joined a lawsuit later in 2019 against Mr. Epstein’s estate. She subsequently dropped her claim. Court records do not indicate if she received any financial settlement. A court record from 2021 said she was separately deemed ineligible for compensation from a fund set up for Epstein victims, but it did not specify why.

Julie Tate and Dylan Freedman contributed reporting.

Mike Baker is a national investigative reporter for The Times, based in Seattle.

Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight."

Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump - The New York Times

Very poorly done cover up’: Bombshell report on how DOJ withheld Trump related Epstein Files

 

Epstein BOMBSHELL rocks Trump WH: DOJ under fire for HIDING ‘Trump files’

 

 

John Roberts Is Losing Patience With Trump

Feb. 24, 2026

Pool photo by Chip Somodevilla

By Linda Greenhouse

“Ms. Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008.

Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t waste words.

His majority opinion in last week’s tariff ruling was, characteristically, a model of succinctness. In a mere 21 pages (Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, by contrast, clocked in at 46 pages, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissent at 63), he explained why, as a matter of statutory interpretation and the constitutional separation of powers, President Trump lacked the authority he had claimed, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to impose a hodgepodge of tariffs on countries all over the world.

There was, however, one exception to the opinion’s conciseness: a meaty paragraph describing the roller-coaster course of Mr. Trump’s tariff regime. Here, with citations to seven separate executive orders omitted for the sake of readability, is the chief justice’s account:

Since imposing each set of tariffs, the president has issued several increases, reductions and other modifications. One month after imposing the 10 percent drug trafficking tariffs on Chinese goods, he increased the rate to 20 percent. One month later, he removed a statutory exemption for Chinese goods under $800. Less than a week after imposing the reciprocal tariffs, the president increased the rate on Chinese goods from 34 percent to 84 percent. The very next day, he increased the rate further still, to 125 percent. This brought the total effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods to 145 percent. The president has also shifted sets of goods into and out of the reciprocal tariff framework ([e.g.] exempting from reciprocal tariffs beef, fruits, coffee, tea, spices and some fertilizers). And he has issued a variety of other adjustments ([e.g.] extending “the suspension of heightened reciprocal tariffs” on Chinese imports).

For all the attention the decision in this case, Learning Resources v. Trump, has received, this paragraph has gone largely unremarked. I understand why; it’s unnecessary to the opinion’s argument. If, as a matter of law, the tariffs are invalid, it doesn’t matter whether they were imposed sensibly or capriciously. The paragraph is, in a word, gratuitous, something that can rarely be said about a passage in a Roberts opinion. So what is it doing there?

The answer, I think, is that the chief justice is sending a message, not necessarily or not only to Mr. Trump but to the waiting world. Something along the lines of: “People, this is what we’re dealing with.” The point being not that “some fertilizers” are now exempt from reciprocal tariffs, but that a reckless president is sowing chaos in America and around the globe.

We don’t need to know Chief Justice Roberts’s innermost thoughts about Mr. Trump — whatever they were before the president, in reaction to the tariff decision, described him and his majority as “fools” and “lap dogs” swayed “by foreign interests” — to discern his exasperation.

For the past year, the Trump administration has trolled the Supreme Court, sending up one emergency application after another to demand temporary relief from adverse lower-court rulings. The administration frequently got what it wanted: a stay of the ruling while an appeal proceeded. Powerful dissenting opinions from the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, made sure the public knew that these orders, while making no law, had the real-world effect of enabling the president to carry out his agenda, including slashing the federal work force and gutting lifesaving foreign assistance programs. Chief Justice Roberts was usually in the majority on these unsigned and generally unexplained orders; obviously he thought the stays were called for. But he probably isn’t happy with the drip-drip-drip of public perception — reflected in polls and social media chatter — that the court was handing the president a blank check.

Something different happened in late December when the justices denied the administration’s request for a stay of a district-court decision barring its use of the National Guard in Illinois. The order was unsigned, with Justices Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissenting. The three-page order essentially made new law by narrowly defining the circumstances under which a president could federalize a state’s National Guard.

This was a very big deal. The president promptly acceded to the order, removing the federalized Guard from Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., as well as Chicago. Yet the court’s action, coming on the day before Christmas Eve, received far less attention than the tariff case. In discussions about the court today, few people even seem to remember it. It is as if the view of the court as the administration’s lackey was so entrenched that evidence to the contrary was too discordant to be fully absorbed.

The tariff decision was the first of the court’s rulings, after full briefing and oral argument, on the merits of one of the second Trump administration’s cases. A decision on the administration’s effort to fire a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors may be next. In that case, the administration claims sufficient cause to dismiss a Fed governor, Lisa Cook, based on assertions it claims she made in mortgage agreements. During oral argument, Chief Justice Roberts seemed to recoil from the overwrought tone of Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s argument, which began with, “Deceit or gross negligence by a financial regulator in financial transactions is cause for removal,” even though there has been no judicial finding that Ms. Cook engaged in either.

“You began by talking about deceit,” Chief Justice Roberts said to Mr. Sauer. “Does what you said after that apply in the case of an inadvertent mistake contradicted by other documents in the record?” Mr. Sauer’s answer, “We would say yes,” hung unsatisfactorily in the air as the argument proceeded for the next two hours.

It’s worth remembering that Chief Justice Roberts is the head of the entire judicial branch. It is in that capacity that his vexation with Mr. Trump verges on acute concern. The president has denounced judges who have ruled against him, including by calling for a Federal District Court judge’s impeachment. Mr. Trump has helped create an atmosphere in which judges appropriately fear for their personal safety and that of their families. Many people expected the chief justice to address this issue directly in his year-end report in December, but he did not. In two decades as the nation’s top jurist, he has at times spoken directly in defense of the judiciary, as in his 2024 report. But these occasions have been infrequent, as if the only messages this notably self-possessed and buttoned-down man cares to send are those his opinions deliver.“

Opinion | Trump’s New Tariffs Are Illegal Too - The New York Times

Trump’s New Tariffs Are Illegal Too

Feb. 24, 2026

Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times

By Lev Menand and Joel Michaels

Mr. Menand is the author of “The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis.” Mr. Michaels served as a senior adviser in the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s use of an international emergency powers statute to impose broad tariffs on imports from across the world.

He immediately announced that he was relying on a different statute — the Trade Act of 1974 — to impose new, near-universal 10 percent tariffs, which he then raised to 15 percent.

These new tariffs are illegal, too. They are just another attempt by the president to ignore the law and dare the courts to stop him.

Courts should put a halt to the new tariffs — before they disrupt global trade and the domestic economy.

The never-used provision the White House is relying on, Section 122, says that the president shall impose tariffs or import restrictions, for up to 150 days, whenever “fundamental international payments problems require” restricting imports to deal with, among other things, “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.” Mr. Trump has seized on this language, pointing primary to America’s substantial and persistent trade deficit (around $900 billion last year).

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But the president misreads the statute. The provision is not about trade imbalances. Other parts of the statute address those. It is about financial imbalances — in particular ones that threaten financial stability.

The text and context of the law is clear: A Section 122 “payments problem” involves a flight from the U.S. dollar. At the moment, no such problem exists.

The president’s own lawyers essentially admitted as much months ago. In a filing in the earlier case, the Justice Department acknowledged that “trade deficits are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits,” citing the congressional history. And they suggested that Section 122 did not give the president the authority to impose tariffs to address trade deficits. (Section 122 does not “have any obvious application” where the concerns “arise from trade deficits,” the Justice Department’s lawyers wrote.)

To further appreciate how badly the president is misreading the law, it is necessary to place this particular statute in the context of the early 1970s. At that time, the United States was still engaged in a postwar effort to manage currency flows between countries. Under the Bretton Woods agreement, reached in 1944, the U.S. dollar was fixed to gold, at $35 per ounce, and other major currencies were convertible to it at fixed exchange rates.

Throughout the 1960s, the U.S. faced a “balance-of-payments deficit”: Too many overseas holders of dollars sought to convert them into gold. As the government’s official gold reserves were depleted, these dynamics accelerated, making it harder to keep the currency peg in place.

In 1971, an acute increase in this deficit caused a payments problem. The Bretton Woods system unraveled. President Richard Nixon closed the so-called gold window that enabled conversion of dollars to gold. The value of the dollar plummeted. To prevent a further collapse, Nixon imposed a temporary 10 percent import surcharge on goods entering the United States. The idea was that reducing imports could help stanch one source of short-term dollar outflows.

The tariff was litigated, and the courts initially held it illegal. In response, Congress drafted a law to provide explicit, narrow authority to impose such import restrictions and surcharges in response to immediate negative shocks to the foreign exchange market: Section 122. Even though Bretton Woods was in shambles, the U.S. was still nominally bound by the old international agreements. And many policymakers thought that the country might return to a system of fixed or flexible exchange rates. Authority like Section 122 was seen as needed to keep such a system stable.

Lawmakers were also concerned about a new international payments problem that had just emerged. In 1973 and 1974, the price of oil skyrocketed. Oil-producing states accumulated enormous wealth denominated in American currency. They parked these so-called petrodollars in bank accounts in Europe, outside U.S. regulators’ control. Just six months before the Trade Act was passed, one highly leveraged German bank collapsed, inciting fears of an international payments-based financial crisis.

These concerns are reflected in the text of Section 122. Alongside the “balance-of-payments deficits,” lawmakers listed “imminent and significant depreciation of the dollar in foreign exchange markets” and “an international balance-of-payments disequilibrium.” And lawmakers explicitly distinguished between trade imbalances and payments problems, such as the rapid movement of petrodollars.

The rest of the provision makes clear that Mr. Trump’s reading is untenable. Section 122 actually requires the president to implement tariffs or quotas — or else to notify and consult with congressional leaders — when there are “fundamental international payments problems.” If the current circumstances meet this definition of a fundamental problem, why didn’t Mr. Trump notify congressional leaders already? Shouldn’t he have told them that we were facing a payments crisis and explain why he was not implementing tariffs under Section 122?

While the statute does not expressly define a “fundamental international payments problem,” under Mr. Trump’s interpretation (including his gesturing at the volume of U.S. financial assets held abroad), we have had such a problem for decades. Given the structure of Section 122, that cannot be right.

As the Supreme Court noted in its opinion last week, the framers gave Congress “alone … access to the pockets of the people.” They did not vest “any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch.”

The president needs legal authority to impose his new tariffs, and Section 122 offers him none. This is a clear case — even more so than the case decided last week.

When affected parties challenge the new levies in the coming days, the courts should step in and put a halt to the levies. The president has replaced one set of illegal tariffs with another."

Opinion | Trump’s New Tariffs Are Illegal Too - The New York Times

Training for New ICE Agents Is ‘Deficient’ and ‘Broken,’ Whistle-Blower Says - The New York Times

Training for New ICE Agents Is ‘Deficient’ and ‘Broken,’ Whistle-Blower Says

"The former official appeared with congressional Democrats, who also released documents indicating significant reductions in instructional hours for recruits.

Feb. 23, 2026

“For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program,” Ryan Schwank told congressional Democrats on Monday.Kenny Holston/The New York Times

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who resigned this month from his job instructing new recruits came forward on Monday as a whistle-blower, describing what he said was a “deficient, defective and broken” training program with a pared-back curriculum as the Trump administration races to expand the agency.

The account by Ryan Schwank, a former ICE lawyer who worked at the federal government’s law enforcement training academy, coincided with the release by Senate Democrats of several dozen pages of internal ICE records that suggest the Trump administration has curtailed the agency’s basic training.

“For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program,” Mr. Schwank said at a forum held in Washington by congressional Democrats. “Cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584-hour program — classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention and the limits of officers’ authority.”

He added: “New cadets are graduating from the academy despite widespread concerns among training staff that even in the final days of training, the cadets cannot demonstrate a solid grasp of the tactics or the law required to perform their jobs.”

Some of the previously unreported documents released on Monday indicate that ICE officers are now training for significantly fewer hours than they did before President Trump’s hiring surge. Others suggest that several training classes appear to have been cut from the required syllabus, including one titled “Use of Force Simulation Training” and others on immigration law and ICE’s legal authorities.

Together, the new disclosures underscore concerns about the conduct and preparedness of Homeland Security Department agents, who have shot and killed at least three American citizens over the last year. Mr. Trump’s decision to order immigration officers into major American cities has led to a rise in violent encounters with members of the public, leading to fears that poor training for new agents will produce more chaos.

Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the department, said in a statement that training hours had not been reduced, adding, “Our officers receive extensive firearm training, are taught de-escalation tactics, and receive Fourth and Fifth Amendment comprehensive instruction.”

Mr. Schwank was hired as an ICE lawyer in 2021 and became an instructor last year at the federal government’s law enforcement training academy in Georgia, where he taught courses on the law. He resigned on Feb. 13 after he and another publicly unidentified person submitted a confidential whistle-blower complaint on a separate matter that has raised constitutional questions: a new ICE policy allowing deportation officers to enter homes and arrest people without a judicial warrant.

“ICE is teaching cadets to violate the Constitution,” he said on Monday at the event with congressional Democrats.

His account comes at a time when funding for the Homeland Security Department has lapsed as Democrats push for a range of new restrictions on immigration agents.

After a planned infusion of $75 billion over four years from Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy bill, ICE has embarked on a massive hiring spree. So far, the agency said it has hired over 12,000 new officers and agents, more than double the existing number. Between October and late January, more than 800 ICE recruits graduated from the academy, according to the documents, which were released by Democrats on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Another 3,204 recruits are projected to graduate by the end of September.

But the surge of recruits threatened to overwhelm the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, which trains most federal agents. In response, ICE officials scaled back the agency’s training regimen, a shift reflected in the newly disclosed documents.

The disclosures include syllabuses containing required courses and daily schedules for ICE basic training. A July 2025 syllabus shows recruits at that time received 584 hours of training over 72 days. A syllabus from this month, however, shows training reduced to eight hours per day over 42 days, which amounts to approximately 336 hours. That would be a roughly 40 percent decrease in training hours.

Todd Lyons, ICE’s acting director, told Congress this month that ICE recruits were now training for “six days a week, 12 hours a day.” He also said agents were receiving new training both before they reported to the training academy and once they showed up for their jobs.

“The meat of the training was never removed,” Mr. Lyons added after being pressed about whether ICE was lowering its standards.

In a fact sheet, the Homeland Security Department said that it had received an additional $750 million in funding for the training academy and that it had “streamlined training to cut redundancy and incorporate technology advancements, without sacrificing basic subject matter content.” The department also noted that many new ICE recruits are “experienced law enforcement officers who have already successfully completed a law enforcement academy.”

Administration officials had previously said the reduction in training time came largely from the elimination of Spanish-language classes. However, the documents show that a number of other classes listed as being required last year no longer appear in the February syllabus. They include courses on handling the property of detainees, filling out paperwork that alleges someone is in the United States without authorization, taking a “victim-centered approach” and “integrity awareness training.”

In addition, other documents show that ICE recruits must now complete only nine practical examinations to graduate from the training academy, compared with 25 exams that were listed in a training syllabus dated July 2021 that was also released by the Democrats.

Among the exams that are no longer listed as being required in an October 2025 syllabus are “Judgment Pistol Shooting” and “Determine Removability,” a reference to how agents decide if people they encounter have legal status in the United States. It was not clear from the documents when those exams were removed.

“Deficient training can and will get people killed,” Mr. Schwank said on Monday. “It can and will lead to unlawful arrests, violations of constitutional rights and fundamental loss of public trust in law enforcement.”

In a statement, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, encouraged other whistle-blowers to speak out.

“To anyone else who is repulsed by what you’re seeing or what authorities are asking you to do, please know that you can make a real difference by coming forward,” Mr. Blumenthal said.

Emily Powell and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Nicholas Nehamas is a Washington correspondent for The Times, focusing on the Trump administration and its efforts to transform the federal government.

Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times."

Training for New ICE Agents Is ‘Deficient’ and ‘Broken,’ Whistle-Blower Says - The New York Times

DOJ removed, withheld Epstein files related to accusations about Trump : NPR

Justice Department withheld and removed some Epstein files related to Trump

Stephen Fowler

An NPR investigation finds the Justice Department has removed or withheld Epstein files related to President Trump.

Department of Justice and Getty Images/Collage by Danielle A. Scruggs/NPR

"The Justice Department has withheld some Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor, an NPR investigation finds. It also removed some documents from the public database where accusations against Jeffrey Epstein also mention Trump.

Some files have not been made public despite a law mandating their release. These include what appears to be more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, and notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor.

NPR reviewed multiple sets of unique serial numbers appearing before and after the pages in question, stamped onto documents in the Epstein files database, FBI case records, emails and discovery document logs in the latest tranche of documentspublished at the end of January. NPR's investigation found dozens of pages that appear to be catalogued by the Justice Department but not shared publicly.

The Justice Department declined to answer NPR's questions on the record about these specific files, what's in them, and why they are not published.

Other files scrubbed from public view pertain to a separate woman who was a key witness for the prosecution in the criminal trial of Epstein's co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking. Maxwell is seeking clemency from Trump. 

Some of those documents were briefly taken down and put back online last week, while others remain hidden, according to NPR's comparison of the initial dataset from Jan. 30 with document metadata of those files currently on the Justice Department website.

NPR does not name victims of sexual abuse.

When asked for comment about the missing pages and the accusations against the president, a White House spokeswoman told NPR that Trump "has done more for Epstein's victims than anyone before him."

"Just as President Trump has said, he's been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein," White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told NPR in a statement. "And by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee's subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein's Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein's victims than anyone before him. Meanwhile, 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 White House has previously pointed to a statement from the Justice Department that says the Epstein files contain "untrue and sensationalist claims" about the president.

In a letter to members of Congress on Feb. 14 first reported by POLITICO, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche insist that no records were withheld or redacted "on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary." 

In the last two weeks, as lawmakers have begun to view unredacted copies of Epstein files, members of both parties have criticized the way the Trump administration has handled the release of the files. They have also continued to accuse the Justice Department of violating the law and operating without transparency in redacting information.

First woman accuses Trump of sexual abuse

According to the newly released files, the FBI internally circulated Epstein-related allegations that mention Trump in late July and early August 2025. The list, collected from the FBI's National Threat Operations Center, included numerous salacious allegations. Agents marked most of the accusations as unverifiable or not credible.

But one lead was sent to the FBI's Washington Office with the purpose of setting up an interview with the accuser. The lead was included in an internal PowerPoint slide deck detailing "prominent names" in the Epstein and Maxwell investigations last fall.

The woman who directly named Trump in her abuse allegation claimed that around 1983, when she was around 13 years old, Epstein introduced her to Trump "who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out."

Out of more than three million pages of files released by the Justice Department in recent months, this specific allegation against Trump only appears in copies of the FBI list of claims and the DOJ slideshow.

But a review of FBI case file logs and discovery documents turned over to Maxwell and her attorneys in the criminal case against her point to one place the claim could have come from — and how serious investigators took it.

The FBI interviewed this Trump and Epstein accuser four times. That is according to an FBI "Serial Report" and a list of Non-Testifying Witness Material in the Maxwell case that were also released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Only the first interview, conducted July 24, 2019, is in the public database. That interview does not mention Trump.

Of 15 documents listed in a log of the Maxwell discovery material for this first accuser, only seven are in the Epstein files database. Those missing also include notes that accompany three of the interviews. The discrepancy in the file for the Trump accuser was first reported by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger. 

According to NPR's review of three different sets of serial numbers stamped onto the files, there appear to be 53 pages of interview documents and notes missing from the public Epstein database.

In the first interview document, the woman discussed ways Epstein abused her as a girl and, in identifying him to investigators, showed a cropped photo of the disgraced financier. Her attorney said it was cropped because she "was concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation."

The FBI agents noted it was a "widely distributed photograph" of Epstein with Trump.

A woman whose biographical details and description of Epstein's abuse found in the FBI interview also line up with details from a victim lawsuit. In the December 2019 filing, "Jane Doe 4" does not mention Trump, and the woman voluntarily dismissed her claims against Epstein's estate in December 2021.

Attorneys for this accuser declined to comment.

Elsewhere in the released Epstein files, someone in the FBI wrote on July 22, 2025, before the list and slide presentation were compiled, that Trump's name was in the larger case files and that "one identified victim claimed abuse by Trump but ultimately refused to cooperate."

Second accuser says she met Trump at Mar-a-Lago

The other woman whose mention of Trump made the DOJ's presentation appears in Maxwell discovery files released last month in what's known as a Testifying Witness 3500 material list.

In the first interview of six with the FBI conducted between Sept. 2019 and Sept. 2021, the second woman detailed how Epstein and Maxwell's abuse began while she was around 13 years old attending the Interlochen Center for the Arts and described how, at one point, Epstein took her to Trump's Mar-a-Lago club to meet him.

"EPSTEIN told TRUMP, 'This is a good one, huh.,'" the interview report reads.

In a 2020 lawsuit against Epstein's estate and Maxwell, the second woman added that both men chuckled and she "felt uncomfortable, but, at the time, was too young to understand why."

That interview was removed from the DOJ's public files some time after initial publication on Jan. 30 and was republished Feb. 19, according to document metadata.

The Justice Department told NPR the only reason any file has been temporarily removed is because it had been flagged by a victim or their counsel for additional review.

Multiple FBI interviews with other people refer to the second woman's meeting with Trump while she was a minor and being abused by Epstein. One interview with a fleeting mention of Trump was removed from the public database and subsequently restored last week, while another interview with the woman's mother is still offline.

In that conversation, the mother recalled hearing that "a prince and DONALD TRUMP visited EPSTEIN's house" which made her "think that if they are there then how could EPSTEIN be a criminal," according to NPR's copy of the file that was first published.

The possible omission of files that mention these women's particular allegations against the president come as the Justice Department has warned about other documents it has published in full that includes what it calls "untrue and sensationalist claims" about Trump. 

At the same time, the Justice Department has removed and reuploaded thousands of pages in recent weeks to fix improperly redacted victim names. That includes documents related to the allegations from these two women, who separately say they were around 13 years old when Epstein first abused them.

Robert Glassman, who represents the woman who testified against Maxwell, sharply criticized the Justice Department's handling of the Epstein files.

"This whole thing is ridiculous," he told NPR. "The DOJ was ordered to release information to the public to be transparent about Epstein and Maxwell's criminal enterprise network. Instead, they released the names of courageous victims who have fought hard for decades to remain anonymous and out of the limelight. Whether the disclosures were inadvertent or not—they had one job to do here and they didn't do it."

A DOJ spokesperson told NPR that the department is working "around the clock" to address concerns from victims and handle additional redactions of personally identifiable information that have been flagged.

"In view of the Congressional deadline, all reasonable efforts have been made to review and redact personal information pertaining to victims, other private individuals, and protect sensitive materials from disclosure," the statement read. "That said, because of the volume of information involved, this website may nevertheless contain information that inadvertently includes non-public personally identifiable information or other sensitive content, to include matters of a sexual nature."

NPR's Saige Miller and Ryan Lucas contributed reporting."

DOJ removed, withheld Epstein files related to accusations about Trump : NPR