Judge Corners DOJ for Covering Up Files on Trump’s 13-Year-Old Accuser
https://www.thedailybeast.com/judge-corners-doj-over-covering-up-files-on-trumps-13-year-old-accuser/
Judge Corners DOJ for Covering Up Files on Trump’s 13-Year-Old Accuser
A federal judge has cornered the Justice Department for withholding files on FBI interviews with the woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was 13.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to release unredacted versions of several Jeffrey Epstein files, or explain why the DOJ should be allowed to keep them secret, as he sided with investigative journalist Katie Phang, who had accused Blanche of violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act. He gave the government until July 2 to comply.
Sullivan’s decision covers FBI notes from interviews with a woman who claimed that Epstein introduced her to Trump in 1984, when she was about 13 years old, and that Trump forced her to perform a sexual act on him. Trump has denied the allegation.
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The South Carolina woman’s allegations were revealed in documents released as part of the DOJ’s Epstein files dump, including redacted FBI documents summarizing the interviews, but The Post and Courier reports that dozens of pages on the interviews have yet to be released.
The woman was interviewed by the FBI four times about her allegations against Trump in 2019, soon after Epstein was arrested on suspicion of federal child sex offenses.
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The woman alleged that Epstein took her to a “very tall building with huge rooms.” Trump, she said, ordered everyone else out of the room, unzipped his pants, and pushed her head “down to his penis.” She then “bit the s--- out of” Trump’s penis, she said, after which he punched her in the head.
The White House has denied the woman’s story.
“The total baselessness of these accusations is also supported by the obvious fact that Joe Biden’s Department of Justice knew about them for four years and did nothing with them—because they knew President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt previously told the Daily Beast. “As we have said countless times, President Trump has been totally exonerated by the release of the Epstein Files.”
The DOJ and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday’s court setback.
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In her suit, Phang had accused Blanche of 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.
The DOJ has released roughly half of the 6 million pages of documents it collected on Epstein, and many of the disclosed files are heavily redacted.
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Blanche responded to Phang’s lawsuit by arguing that she cannot sue to compel the DOJ to release documents and must instead seek them through a Freedom of Information Act request.
In his 48-page opinion, Sullivan concluded that Phang had the right to sue over unreleased files and that FOIA “does not provide an adequate remedy.”
In addition to ordering the DOJ to release the documents requested by Phang or “show cause” why it cannot comply, Sullivan also ordered the agency to release a log listing every redaction it has made to the files it has published, as required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
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