“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,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) in a Tuesday press release.
His statement came on the same day that NPR published an investigative report regarding documents related to President Donald Trump it said have been withheld from the massive file dump regarding the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein released by the U.S. Department of Justice in late January. Congress ordered the DOJ to release these files with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
According to NPR’s report, the withheld files include information about claims that Trump allegedly sexually abused a minor decades ago.
“The FBI internally circulated Epstein-related allegations that mention Trump in late July and early August 2025,” said NPR, citing the DOJ files on Epstein. “The list, collected from the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center, included numerous salacious allegations. Agents marked most of the accusations as unverifiable or not credible.”
One lead was sent to the FBI’s Washington office, “with the purpose of setting up an interview with the accuser,” NPR said. It was also included in an internal PowerPoint slideshow.
NPR said that a woman who directly named Trump in her abuse allegation claimed Epstein introduced her to Trump in 1983, when she was around 13 years old. She claimed that Trump “forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit,” and that, “in response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.”
Back in 1983, Trump (then married to first wife Ivana) was building his reputation as a real estate mogul and was debuting Trump Tower – the headquarters of the Trump Organization – which has just opened in Manhattan. Epstein had left his position as limited partner at Bear Stearns investment bank two years prior, according to the 2003 Vanity Fair piece “The Talented Mr. Epstein”.
“Thereafter the details recede into shadow,” said Vanity Fair of Epstein. “A few of the handful of current friends who have known him since the early 1980s recall that he used to tell them he was a ‘bounty hunter,’ recovering lost or stolen money for the government or for very rich people.”
It also said that “Epstein insists that ever since he left Bear Stearns in 1981 he has managed money only for billionaires – who depend on him for discretion.”
While Trump has admitted to knowing Epstein, he has said that they cut ties in the early 2000s. Epstein had already been convicted of sex crimes when he died in 2019 while on trial for sex trafficking minors.
NPR said that “out of more than 3 million pages of files released by the Justice Department in recent months,” information regarding the 1983 Trump allegation “appears only in copies of the FBI list of claims and the DOJ slideshow.”
“The FBI interviewed this Trump and Epstein accuser four times,” said NPR. “That is according to an FBI ‘Serial Report’ and a list of Non-Testifying Witness Material in the [Ghislaine] Maxwell case that were also released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act,” NPR said. Maxwell is now serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors and is seeking clemency from Trump.
Per NPR, only the first interview of the four – conducted on July, 24, 2019, shortly before Epstein’s death in a jail cell that August – is in the DOJ’s public database. It does not mention Trump.
“According to NPR’s review of three different sets of serial numbers stamped onto the files, there appear to be 53 pages of interview documents and notes missing from the public Epstein database,” said the outlet. It also said that “someone in the FBI wrote on July 22, 2025, before the list and slide presentation were compiled, that Trump’s name was in the larger case files and that ‘one identified victim claimed abuse by Trump but ultimately refused to cooperate.’”
A second woman who mentioned Trump was also included in the DOJ presentation, said NPR. She appears in the Maxwell discovery files released last month “in what’s known as a Testifying Witness 3500 material list,” it explained.
“In the first interview of six with the FBI conducted between September 2019 and September 2021, the second woman detailed how Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse began while she was around 13 years old and attending the Interlochen Center for the Arts and described how, at one point, Epstein took her to Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club to meet him,” said the outlet. She described feeling uncomfortable due to the way the two men spoke about her, the report noted.
According to NPR, “that interview was removed from the DOJ’s public files some time after initial publication on Jan. 30 and was republished Feb. 19,” based on document metadata. However, the outlet said that “multiple FBI interviews with other people refer to the second woman’s meeting with Trump while she was a minor and being abused by Epstein.”
“One interview with a fleeting mention of Trump was removed from the public database and subsequently restored last week, while another interview with the woman’s mother is still offline,” ir added. “After publication, the Justice Department said, the file required additional redactions and will be reposted soon.”
The Justice Department told NPR that files have been temporarily removed if they have been flagged by Epstein victims or their counsel for additional review.
Robert Glassman, who represents the woman who testified against Maxwell, criticized the way the DOJ has handled the files overall, including redaction errors.
“This whole thing is ridiculous,” he said, according to NPR. “The DOJ was ordered to release information to the public to be transparent about Epstein and Maxwell’s criminal enterprise network. Instead, they released the names of courageous victims who have fought hard for decades to remain anonymous and out of the limelight. Whether the disclosures were inadvertent or not – they had one job to do here and they didn’t do it.”
Although the Justice Department declined to answer NPR’s questions on the record about the specific files related to accusations against Trump, the department reportedly reached out after publication. Spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre said that any documents not published are privileged, are duplicates or relate to an ongoing federal investigation.
“Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson also told NPR in a statement. “And by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”
Other high-profile figures that have shown up in the Epstein files include former President Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Elon Musk and Richard Branson.
A jury previously found Trump guilty of sexual abuse in a trial addressing columnist E. Jean Carroll’s claim that he assaulted her in a New York City department store in 1996. Another jury ruled that Trump should pay millions in damages for defamation after he said she made the claim up. Both cases have been upheld in appellate courts, but Trump denies guilt and has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.