A bombshell report regarding the Epstein files is threatening to spoil President Donald Trump’s big day.
An NPR investigation, published the morning of the president’s State of the Union address, alleges that the DOJ withheld dozens of documents from its Epstein release that may pertain to a woman who accused Trump and Jeffrey Epstein of sexually abusing her when she was a minor.
The FBI took the allegations against the president so seriously that it reportedly sent agents to interview his accuser a total of four times in 2019. However, only documents regarding the first interview have been released, independent journalist Roger Sollenberger revealed this month.
NPR now reports that the missing documents from the next three interviews “include what appears to be more than 50 pages” of documents detailing FBI sit-downs with the accuser, who said she was around 13 when she was abused by the men in the early 1980s.
The outlet writes that it reviewed serial numbers and found that “dozens of pages” are catalogued by the Justice Department but not shared publicly.
NPR’s report says only the FBI’s first interview with the Trump accuser, in which she makes no allegations of wrongdoing against the president, was part of the DOJ’s massive records release made public late last month. It is unknown what was said in the next three alleged interviews.
The White House did not respond to an email seeking comment. Reached for comment, Justice Department spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre claimed that NPR wrongly stated the DOJ declined to respond to questions about what it described as missing files.
“We have not deleted anything, and as we have always said, all documents responsive were produced,” Baldassarre said in an email to the Daily Beast. She said that documents not included on the DOJ site “fall within one of the following categories: duplicates, privileged, [or] part of an ongoing federal investigation.”
NPR’s eye-popping investigation comes a week after Sollenberger, who used to work for the Daily Beast, reported that files associated with the interviews of the Trump accuser appeared to be missing from the DOJ’s public Epstein database—contradicting Attorney General Pam Bondi’s claim that her release of more than three million pages of the Epstein files was everything the Justice Department had on the matter.
In total, NPR reported finding what appears to be “53 pages of interview documents and notes” missing from the public database.
Trump’s accuser claims that he pushed her head down and pressured her to perform oral sex on him after being introduced by Epstein—an allegation listed in an internal FBI slideshow that was made public in the DOJ’s Epstein files dump.
The woman told investigators that she retaliated against Trump by biting his penis, according to the internal FBI document. She said that Trump then punched her in the head and kicked her out of the room—an allegation laid bare in a slide that detailed allegations against other “prominent names” in the federal probes of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
NPR’s investigation also alleged that the DOJ removed some documents from its public database without explanation.
Specifically, NPR reports that the DOJ released some files related to the prosecution of Maxwell on January 30 and later took them down. It reported that some files have since been reuploaded, but not all.
The FBI internally circulated Epstein-related allegations against Trump last summer but deemed most of them to be unverifiable or not credible, NPR reported. However, the quartet of interviews with the president’s accuser—the first of which was conducted on July 24, 2019—suggests that the FBI deemed her claims credible enough to probe.
In her first interview with investigators, documents show that the woman asked agents if she could show them a cropped photo of Epstein—which omitted Trump—to identify the disgraced financier as one of the men who abused her.
The woman told investigators she cropped the photo to exclude Trump because she “was concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation.” Trump was president at the time of the interview. Epstein died in his prison cell the following month, on Aug. 10, 2019. Officials ruled his death a suicide.
NPR reports that the woman’s biographical details match those of an accuser who filed a lawsuit against the Epstein estate in December 2019. The suit does not mention Trump, and the woman voluntarily dismissed her claims against the estate after securing a settlement in 2021.
An FBI document from last summer noted the accusation against Trump, but added that his accuser “ultimately refused to cooperate.”
