The Only Interview The DOJ Released

There is a set of documents in the public record that most Americans have never had described to them plainly. I want to do that, without embellishment, and then explain why the way they entered the record matters more than any single claim inside them.

In 1994, according to a lawsuit filed in 2016, a thirteen-year-old girl was assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump at Epstein's Manhattan apartment. The suit came with three sworn declarations. The plaintiff's own, made under penalty of perjury. A second from a woman who swore she had been hired by Epstein to recruit adolescent girls throughout the 1990s, and who stated that she personally witnessed Trump's abuse of two minors, aged twelve and thirteen. A third from a woman who said the plaintiff described the assaults to her during the 1994-1995 school year.

The lawsuit was withdrawn on November 4, 2016, four days before the presidential election. Her lawyer said she had received threats. It was never adjudicated. No court ever tested it.

Then there are the FBI memos.

Between July and October 2019, federal agents interviewed a woman four times. She told them Epstein had abused her repeatedly beginning when she was approximately thirteen. In three of those four interviews, she also accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her as a minor. During one session, she showed agents a well-known photograph of Trump and Epstein together, and her attorney told the FBI she was afraid of implicating people who were, in the lawyer's words, well known, because she feared retaliation.

When the Justice Department released millions of pages of Epstein files this January, one of those four interviews was in the database. It was the only one in which she did not name Trump.

The other three were not there.

They surfaced because CNN's reporters counted. An analysis of the evidence logs found dozens of witness interviews absent from the public archive, including the three memos containing the allegations against the president. Only after that reporting did the Department of Justice post them, in March, along with an explanation: fifteen documents had been "incorrectly coded as duplicative." The Department did not say how. It offered nothing beyond the suggestion of human error. And as of the evening the memos went up, the handwritten notes from those same interviews were still not in the database.

Now the part that honesty requires, because a claim like this is worth nothing if it is not held to the standard we demand of everyone else.

None of this has been proven. FBI 302 memos are an agent's summary of what a witness said, not a finding of fact, and reporters across every outlet that has handled these documents have said so directly. The lawsuit was dropped without a ruling. No criminal charges involving minors have ever been filed against Donald Trump, and he has consistently denied wrongdoing. The White House called the allegations baseless and pointed to the accuser's criminal record. There is material in the record that cuts the other way, too: an attorney who represented many Epstein victims swore that Trump was the only person who voluntarily cooperated with his investigation, and Trump reportedly barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after Epstein behaved inappropriately toward a member's teenage daughter.

All of that belongs in the account. I put it there deliberately.

Because the argument is not that these allegations are true. I do not know whether they are true. The argument is that the only institution capable of establishing whether they are true is the same institution that quietly left three of them out of a public release and then explained it as a filing mistake.

That is the scandal. Not what the memos allege, but that we learned of them by accident, from journalists counting pages, rather than from a government that told us it was giving us everything.

A department that miscodes the most consequential documents in its possession does not get to be trusted with the rest of them.

Release the Epstein files. All of them.