House Democrats are accusing the Justice Department of illegally withholding FBI interviews with a woman who accused Donald Trump of crimes linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Robert Garcia announced that Democrats on his committee would open a new investigation into the matter.
“For the last few weeks, Oversight Democrats have been investigating the FBI’s handling of allegations from 2019 of sexual assault on a minor made against President Donald Trump by a survivor,” Garcia said.
“Yesterday, I reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the Department of Justice. Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes,” he continued.
He called for records to be immediately shared with Congress under the committee’s subpoena for all documents and the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
“Covering up direct evidence of a potential assault by the President of the United States is the most serious possible crime in this White House cover up,” Garcia said in a statement.
It comes after NPR released a new report that the Justice Department withheld Epstein files related to Trump and removed others.
The Justice Department immediately fired back at the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, accusing them of misleading the public.
The DOJ claimed in a post on X that it had “repeatedly said publicly AND directly to @NPR prior to deadline - NOTHING has been deleted. If files are temporarily pulled for victim redactions or to redact Personally Identifiable Information, then those documents are promptly restored online and are publicly available."
“ALL responsive documents have been produced unless a document falls within one of the following categories: duplicates, privileged, or part of an ongoing federal investigation,” the department insisted.
However, some files have not been made public despite the law requiring the release of all Epstein documents, according to the NPR investigation.
The report indicated that the withheld files appear to include more than 50 pages of FBI interviews as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of abuse decades ago when she was still a minor.
According to NPR, material from accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s case indicated the accuser was interviewed four times, but only the FBI’s first interview conducted with the accuser in 2019, in which Trump was not mentioned, was included in the massive document dump last month. It remains unknown what was said in the next three interviews.
It also found other files removed included a separate woman who was a key witness in the criminal trial against Epstein accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
NPR reviewed serial numbers on the pages before and after the ones in question and found dozens of pages appear to have been catalogued but not shared by DOJ.
