The United States Justice Department has published additional FBI documents as part of a congressionally mandated release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. The department stated on Thursday that these documents had not been made public earlier because they were mistakenly marked as “duplicative.” The files describe interviews with a woman who alleges she was sexually assaulted by Epstein and Donald Trump when she was between 13 and 15 years old.
According to descriptions of multiple 2019 interviews conducted by the FBI, the woman claimed Epstein took her to “either New York or New Jersey” and introduced her to Trump. She told investigators that she bit Trump when he attempted to force her to perform oral sex. The woman also reported that she and people close to her received threatening calls over the years demanding silence, which she believed were linked to Epstein.
FBI records reportedly indicate that agents stopped speaking with her in 2019. In the report of her final interview in October 2019, during Trump’s first presidency, agents asked if she would be willing to provide more information about Trump. In response, the agent wrote, she “asked what the point would be of providing the information at this point in her life when there was a strong possibility nothing could be done about it.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the woman’s claims “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence.” Trump has denied any wrongdoing related to the Epstein allegations, and the Justice Department previously said some of the released documents “contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump.”
Democrats are investigating the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files. Republican US Congressman Thomas Massie, who helped push the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act through Congress last year, said on Sunday, “bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away.” He has also been critical of the war.
Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, an analyst with Atlas Global Strategies and a former Israeli diplomat, told Al Jazeera that Trump “really needs a distraction from [his domestic issues] in the form of a war.” He added, “And if you look at searches on Google for the Epstein files, they’ve plummeted since this started. So, at least temporarily, it’s succeeding. It’s taking up Congress’s time and it’s taking up the media’s time.”
Source: www.aljazeera.com