WASHINGTON – Democrats are pressing Attorney General Pam Bondi for the reason the Justice Department has withheld documents potentially related to an FBI investigation into an accusation of sexual misconduct by President Donald Trump decades ago.
In response to public pressure, the Justice Department said Wednesday it’s “currently reviewing” whether to add the material to its public database of documents from its investigation of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The department previously insisted this week that the only material it withheld was either duplicative, contained material subject to attorney-client privilege, or was part of an ongoing federal investigation.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said the missing FBI forms, recounting agent interviews with a woman who said Trump sexually abused her as a minor, shouldn’t be privileged and certainly weren’t duplicates.
“The only option that they have left is that President Trump is under a federal investigation,” Garcia told HuffPost on Tuesday.
In a letter to Bondi on Wednesday, Garcia said he independently confirmed that the department has withheld the FBI files by reviewing the unredacted files in an office set up for members of Congress. He warned it would be improper to use a sham investigation as a pretext to keep Epstein material secret.
“Alternatively, and even more seriously, if DOJ is actively investigating allegations of sexual abuse leveled against President Trump by an Epstein survivor, Congress and the American people have a right to know, immediately,” Garcia wrote.
The independent journalist Roger Sollenberger first raised questions about the FBI forms earlier this month, noting serial numbers reflecting the existence of the forms on a list of “Non-Testifying Witness Material” from the government’s case against Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. The list suggests the FBI repeatedly interviewed an Epstein victim who also said she was abused by Trump in the 1980s, but there’s a form from only one interview with the victim in the department’s public Epstein Library. First NPR, then HuffPost and other news outlets picked up the story this week.
In a social media statement on Wednesday, the Justice Department acknowledged the questions about potentially missing documents.
“Several individuals and news outlets have recently flagged files related to documents produced to Ghislaine Maxwell in discovery of her criminal case that they claim appear to be missing,” the statement said. “As with all documents that have been flagged by the public, the Department is currently reviewing files within that category of the production. Should any document be found to have been improperly tagged in the review process and is responsive to the Act, the Department will of course publish it, consistent with the law.”
An attorney for Maxwell did not respond when asked on Wednesday if he had the documents.
In the one summary of an FBI interview with the woman that’s available in the database, she describes Epstein recruiting her to work as a “babysitter” at a South Carolina vacation property when she was in her early teens. The interview was conducted in 2019, as the government was building its sex trafficking case against Epstein, and it doesn’t mention misconduct by Trump.
The woman’s basic biographical details match those of another FBI source, however, who told investigators a lurid anecdote about Trump forcing her into a sex act and violently assaulting her in the early 1980s. Democrats say the other FBI forms may reflect an investigation into that incident.
