A judge has ordered the DOJ to cough up notes from interviews between the FBI and a woman who alleged Donald Trump forced her to give him oral sex when she was 13.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Reagan appointee in Washington, ordered the DOJ to hand over all handwritten notes from its four 2019 interviews with Trump’s accuser, who alleges she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to meet Trump in 1984.
Attorney General Todd Blanche’s DOJ filed an appeal Thursday in a desperate attempt to keep the notes under wraps.
The legal wrangling centers on a lawsuit filed by former MS Now host Katie Phang, who has sued the government and demanded that it release more unredacted Epstein files—like those involving the president’s teenage accuser.
Phang says Blanche is violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act by failing to publish all the documents the government holds about the convicted sex trafficker and by improperly redacting documents.
Sullivan’s order this week did not require the DOJ to release the handwritten notes publicly—just to his court. Still, the DOJ, as it has with other documents related to Epstein, has argued that the evidence should remain unreleased.
MS Now reports that the DOJ argued against releasing the interview notes because it claimed the documents duplicated FBI interview memoranda already released. Sullivan disagreed, saying the DOJ has already released handwritten notes from over 100 witness and survivor interviews and can do the same in the case of Trump’s accuser.
The accuser, known as “Jane Doe 4,” was interviewed by the FBI after Epstein was arrested on federal child sex-trafficking charges in July 2019, during Trump’s first term. She alleges that Epstein took her to New York or New Jersey and that Trump abused her there.
A redacted FBI report—released as part of an Epstein files dump this year—revealed that the woman told interviewers Trump forced her to perform a sexual act on him. The woman says Trump punched her in the side of the head after she allegedly “bit the s--t out of” his penis.
The woman claimed that Trump, who would have been in his late 30s, then yelled: “Get this little b---h the hell out of here.”
The White House has said the woman’s claims are “backed by zero credible evidence” and are “totally baseless,” and Trump himself has long denied any wrongdoing in connection to Epstein.
A formal probe into Trump’s alleged abuse was reportedly never opened because of high evidentiary hurdles and an uncooperative witness.
That same accuser told the FBI she was repeatedly abused by Epstein in South Carolina. She also claims to have been abused by the businessman Jimmy Atkins, Charleston’s The Post and Courier has reported. Atkins died in 2003.
The South Carolina paper reports that it has reviewed handwritten notes from the FBI interviews with Trump’s accuser, but said it could not corroborate any of the claims.
Trump and Epstein were friends who were frequently photographed together in the 1990s and early 2000s, but there is no evidence that their friendship goes as far back as the early 1980s, when Trump’s accuser says she was assaulted by him in a “very tall building with huge rooms.”
