Thursday, February 26, 2026

DOJ hasn't released some Epstein files related to a woman who made an allegation against Trump

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/doj-not-released-epstein-files-related-woman-made-allegation-trump-rcna260672 

 

DOJ hasn't released some Epstein files related to a woman who made an allegation against Trump

The files don't include records from three FBI interviews with a woman who said Jeffrey Epstein abused her and who also made sexual abuse allegations against President Trump, according to an NBC News analysis.
New questions over Epstein documents DOJ hasn't released
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By Laura Strickler, Rebecca Kaplan, Ryan J. Reilly, Ryan Nobles, Michael Kosnar and Hallie Jackson
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WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice has not released summaries and notes from three separate interviews the FBI conducted with a South Carolina woman who alleged she was a sexual assault victim of Jeffrey Epstein and also made sexual abuse allegations against President Donald Trump, according to an NBC News analysis of the Epstein files and information provided by a source familiar with the investigation.

Those files are also not included in the unredacted collection available for members of Congress to view at the Department of Justice, according to Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee.

The woman came forward to federal law enforcement shortly after Epstein was arrested in 2019 with a lengthy description of how he assaulted her on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, when she was 13 years old in or around 1984, according to a summary of the FBI interview released by DOJ.

The FBI determined that the woman’s initial allegations against Epstein were significant enough that the FBI followed up with her for interviews on four separate dates: July 24, 2019, Aug. 7, 2019, Aug. 20, 2019 and Oct. 16, 2019, according to an evidence catalog in the case against convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell that was released by DOJ. The interviews with the woman were listed as part of that catalogue.

But only the FBI’s summary of the interview from July 24, 2019 is included in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department.

The July 24, 2019 interview includes allegations of repeated sexual abuse by Epstein, and does not mention allegations against Trump.

But a source familiar with the investigation confirmed to NBC News that the Epstein survivor from Hilton Head Island is the same person who made an additional allegation that she was forced into a sex act with Trump when she was 13 years old in New Jersey.

It is not clear whether the sexual abuse allegations against Trump were discussed in the other interviews that were not released by DOJ.

Asked for comment, the White House referred to a statement the Justice Department issued last month when the Epstein files were released. That Justice Department statement at the time said, “This production may include fake or falsely submitted images, documents or videos, as everything that was sent to the FBI by the public was included in the production that is responsive to the Act. Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false, and if they have a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”

On Wednesday, a Justice Department spokesperson provided this statement in response to a query on the missing documents, “As we have always said, all documents responsive were produced, those not fall within one of the following categories: duplicates, privileged, part of an ongoing federal investigation.”

The alleged assault by Trump was referenced in an August 2025 document prepared by the FBI’s Child Exploitation & Human Trafficking Task Force. The document summarized claims reported to the National Threat Operations Center in which Trump was mentioned. Most of the claims were either deemed not credible or made by people who provided no contact information.

The alleged assault is separately referenced in an FBI presentation summarizing the entire Epstein case.

At the time the summary was released along with a trove of other records, on Jan. 30, the White House responded by pointing reporters to a press release from DOJ that said, "This production may include fake or falsely submitted images, documents or videos, as everything that was sent to the FBI by the public was included in the production that is responsive to the Act. Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false, and if they have a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already."

The law mandating the release of the Epstein files allows DOJ to withhold records that contain victim information, child sexual abuse materials, and that would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution. It prohibits withholding documents “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”

The South Carolina woman filed a lawsuit against the Epstein estate in 2019, according to court filings and Epstein files released by DOJ.

NBC News is not naming the woman. NBC News has reached out to an attorney who has previously represented the woman but has not received a response.

Independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and NPR were first to report the missing files.

The White House provided a statement to NPR about missing files related to accusations against the president: “Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson 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. Meanwhile, Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries and Stacey Plaskett have yet to explain why they were soliciting money and meetings from Epstein after he was a convicted sex offender.”

Jeffries told CNN in a Nov. 18 interview that he had "no recollection" of an email that the White House said was sent by a political consulting firm in 2013 to Epstein seeking money for the New York congressman. Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, also told CNN that he never had a conversation with or received a donation from Epstein.

In an interview with NBC News, Garcia said he went to view the unredacted files at the Justice Department on Monday and was not able to locate any of the missing files, even in an unredacted form — which he says is a violation of both the Epstein Files Transparency Act as well as the House Oversight Committee subpoena issued to DOJ in August 2025 for all Epstein-related materials.

“There is definitely, in my opinion, evidence of, of a cover up happening. Why are these documents missing? These documents I personally saw, I know who the survivor is, the name is redacted in the doc, in the manifest document, and there are documents missing from the same survivor that appeared to be interviews or conversations, again, appear to be with the FBI,” he said. “The FBI clearly investigated, and now those documents are gone.”

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  • 2025-11-06: [shots, 7 holes': Border Patrol supervisor appeared to brag about shooting woman] — A Border Patrol supervisor who shot a woman after a crash in Chicago allegedly texted “5 shots, 7 holes,” and a judge is now examining whether federal agents mishandled key evidence by releasing his SUV before defense experts could inspect it.

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    Trump’s ICE Is Quietly Stockpiling Weaponry—and It Should Alarm Us All

    https://newrepublic.com/article/206994/ice-stockpiling-military-weaponry-trump-forever-war 

    Trump’s ICE Is Quietly Stockpiling Weaponry—and It Should Alarm Us All

    In addition to staffing up at a furious rate, ICE and CPB are acquiring a vast cache of weapons from private contractors, new data reveals. This will not end well—or anytime soon.

    Donald Trump stands during a press conference
    Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
    The “forever wars” abroad and the global war on terror after the September 11 attacks left behind a long trail of failure, disillusionment, and death—but they also funneled huge sums of taxpayer money to companies that supplied the equipment that made all that destruction possible. That resulted in

    Something like this is happening again in a different theater of operations: Donald Trump’s campaign of violent mass deportations. It’s becoming its own forever war: It could drag on for years or decades without success. It’s producing misguided military occupations of restive local populations. It has launched a huge arms buildup. And it also has what might be termed its very own war profiteers.

    To wit: A handful of private companies that manufacture weaponry and ammunition have already inked very lucrative contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, which will provide it with enormous stockpiles of military-style equipment, some to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, according to data from Senator Adam Schiff’s office, which is probing DHS contracts.

    The pileup of all that equipment hints at a major long-term problem. Just as we saw in the long aftermath of September 11, this new and evolving MAGA terror bureaucracy will expand in grotesque ways. It too will grow less constrained as it amasses more troops—and more firepower.

    A harrowing glimpse of this future lies in a new report by Schiff that has gotten surprisingly little notice: It finds that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection have formally approved contracts for at least a whopping $144 million in weapons, ammunition, and other accessories during Trump’s first year. The analysis—based on government contracting data—documents at least a fourfold increase for ICE and a doubling for CBP, relative to 2024, concluding that this will “build a heavily-armed domestic police force.”

    It’s eye-opening stuff. One ICE contract is with Geissele Automatics for millions of dollars’ worth of “precision long guns and accessories” to support “armed agents” and other ICE operations, Schiff’s report says. This involves an unknown number of Geissele Border Patrol rifles, the report notes, describing this weapon as an “AR-style rifle with military specifications.” CBP contracted for millions of dollars more in rifles, as well.

    ICE and CBP also contracted with Glock for millions of dollars in handguns and accessories, the report says. Taking all these contracts together, the report starkly concludes: “ICE and CBP have together placed orders to purchase thousands of new high-powered lethal weapons at taxpayer expense.”

    There’s still more. The report documents ICE and CBP contracts totaling more than $30 million in ammunition and more than $25 million in contracts for the “non-lethal” weapons. That’s not a reassuring description: They include Tasers, pepper spray, and tear gas canisters.

    In short, we’re looking at a massive stockpiling of weapons that will be in ICE’s and CBP’s possession for years to come. And someone is supplying all that equipment.

    At my request, Schiff’s office analyzed the contracting data it collected to determine which companies are the top ICE and CBP contractors. Here are the results, per a chart provided by Schiff’s staff:

    These particular contracts are mostly for small arms (including AR-style rifles), ordnance, ammunition, and related accessories like gun sights and suppressors, Schiff’s office says. A subcategory includes pepper spray, Tasers, tear gas, and other “non-lethal” weaponry.

    “These contracts expose how DHS has set in motion a massive surge in spending to put even more dangerous weapons in ICE and CBP’s arsenal,” Schiff told me in an emailed statement. “This misuse of taxpayer dollars to maximally arm federal immigration agents, including those with questionable vetting and insufficient training, must end.”

    ICE, of course, has long been an overly militarized agency, including under Democratic presidents. But under Trump this has escalated dramatically. ICE aims to continue vastly expanding its recruiting, fueled by tens of billions in new federal dollars. And under Trump, this bureaucracy is unshackling itself in fresh ways, conducting warrantless arrests, expanding surveillance capacities, and building an archipelago of enormous new prison camps.

    In a sense, we’re seeing yet more cancerous growth of the post-September 11 national security bureaucracy, but with a more intensified inward focus. DHS, which was created after September 11, has long had a domestic anti-terror component. But now Trump has supercharged its role as a mass immigrant-expulsion operation that is unleashing violence toward U.S. citizens—and even killing them—while operating with near-total impunity among American populations, which Trump officials openly describe as a good thing.

    “It’s the transformation of DHS from an entity that protected the homeland from external threats to one increasingly policing American society,” Donald Moynihan, author of an excellent Substack on state capacity, tells me. With this ramped-up stockpiling, Moynihan says, the endgame will be “filling those warehouses with people and using those guns and that technology to control American cities.”

    The war on terror also teaches us that expanding bureaucracies like these only grow harder to control over time. “Trump is building up a well-funded, poorly trained paramilitary force that could easily take on a life of its own,” says Georgetown national security law expert Rosa Brooks. “Once you have a massive moneymaking machine ginned up, it’s hard to reverse course and turn off the spigot.”

    The folly and waste of the forever wars, we are endlessly told, enabled Trump to successfully campaign against elites who foolishly sank unlimited blood and treasure into misguided imperial adventures abroad. Yet Trump’s mass deportations constitute their own forever war.

    This is not meant glibly: Measured in political years, Trump’s mass expulsions actually will seemingly go on forever. Deporting an estimated 14 million people, if it continues at current rates, will take longer than this Trump term followed by two terms of President JD Vance. The scaled-up prison camps, if they materialize, will seemingly have to be packed for years, constituting an ever-expanding immigrant carceral state.

    Meanwhile, just like the forever wars, this fiasco is also birthing its own captive constituencies and internal political momentum. This includes everyone from the private contractors supplying it to the large population of MAGA-adjacent young (and not so young) men signing up for ICE, which writer John Ganz describes as “an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob.”

    Any entity this hypermaterialized—especially one simultaneously aimed at immigrants—will inevitably attract white nationalists and evolve into a political paramilitary force in thrall to ideologically aligned leaders, as Substacker Brian Beutler explains. This is borne out in ICE recruitment messaging, which explicitly seeks to get recruits invested in the mission of achieving national rejuvenation by employing cleansing ethno-nationalist violence.

    The stockpiling of weapons underscores the point unnervingly. Now that Trump is feinting toward winding down in Minneapolis, what will be done with all that ideologically fired-up ICE manpower—and all that heavy weaponry? Even a relatively benign answer is alarming. It means more operations like the one in Minneapolis, but packaged with a sheen of new constraints that will simply be shrugged off by the force of this machine’s internal momentum—with more horrors awaiting us.

    This is a quagmire for Trump, even if he doesn’t know it. Appropriately enough, it has also been created by unprincipled elite folly—only MAGA elites support it, while the American people very much do not. Trump’s approval on immigration, once a foundational political strength, has deteriorated rapidly at moments when ICE dominates our attention. If his forever war continues in its current form—with its bureaucracy metastasizing in unpredictable directions—it will further cripple his presidency. And it’s darkly fitting that it may take down the presidential ambitions of Vance, also a self-proclaimed critic of forever war follies, along with him.

    Greg Sargent

    Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast. A seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author of the critically acclaimed book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.  

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    Politics, Donald Trump, Immigration And Customs Enforcement, ICE, Military

     

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