US Department of Justice releases interviews with women who accused Donald Trump of disappearing

WASHINGTON: The Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday released FBI documents describing multiple interviews with a woman who has made accusations against President Trump. The pages were withheld from a trove of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after officials said they were mistakenly determined to be duplicates.The notes recount multiple interviews conducted by the FBI in 2019 with the woman who said she had been sexually assaulted by Epstein and Trump. She came forward shortly after Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges. Her accusations date back to the 1980s, when she was a teenager.

The department has released documents describing the existence of the memo released Thursday, showing that the FBI has conducted four interviews related to her claims and written summaries of each conversation. But the initial release appeared to contain only one of the interviews, in which she described being assaulted by Epstein, raising questions about why the remaining three were missing. Initially, officials said they were replicas posted elsewhere, but a subsequent review found that was incorrect, officials said.The absence of the memo has further fueled criticism from some lawmakers and victims who say the Trump administration has failed to live up to its responsibilities under the law. The Epstein Documents Transparency Act, passed by Congress in November, requires the government to release all documents related to Epstein.The Justice Department acknowledged that in addition to the FBI memo, it discovered about a dozen other documents that were “erroneously coded as duplicates.” Additionally, prosecutors determined that five prosecution memos marked as privileged could be released after being redacted.