A sign with a photo of U.S. President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein is held up as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) speaks at a press conference announcing surveillance efforts on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s file at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 26, 2026.
Brendan Smialowski AFP | Getty Images
The Justice Department on Thursday released additional Jeffrey Epstein files related to unsubstantiated accusations by women against President Donald Trump that the department said were wrongly withheld from a previous investigation.
The department announced last week that it was working to determine whether records had been improperly suppressed after multiple news outlets reported that the trove of records released did not include some files recording a series of interviews conducted in 2019 with women who had made allegations against President Trump.
The accuser was interviewed four times by the FBI to evaluate her account, but the released files only included a summary of one of those interviews.
The department announced Thursday that the files were “incorrectly coded as duplicate files” and were inadvertently not released along with other investigative documents related to a disgraced financier who committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
“As we have consistently done in the past, when a member of the public reports a concern about information in a library, the department investigates, makes corrections and republishes it online,” the department said in a post to X.
Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein. The department said in January that some of the documents contained “false and sensational allegations against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI shortly before the 2020 election.”
The new disclosures come as Attorney General Pam Bondi continues to face turmoil over her department’s handling of files released under legislation passed by Congress after months of public and political pressure. Five Republicans on the House Oversight Committee joined Democrats on Wednesday in voting to subpoena Bondi, demanding he answer questions under oath, signaling growing dissatisfaction among members of the president’s own party.
The Trump administration has faced constant political headaches since the files began being released in December, with critics accusing the department of hiding certain documents and over-editing files, or in some cases not redacting them enough. In some cases, the department has mistakenly released nude photos showing potential victims’ faces, names, email addresses, and other personal information, unedited or not fully obscured.
Department officials have defended their handling of the files, saying they took pains to release them as quickly as legally possible while protecting victims. Department officials said the mistake was inevitable given the amount of material, the number of lawyers who viewed the file and the speed with which the department had to release the material. The department said it has the right to withhold records that expose potential abuse victims, records that have been duplicated or were protected by legal privilege, and records that are related to an ongoing criminal investigation.
Part of the new records released Thursday concerns a woman who contacted the FBI shortly after Epstein’s arrest in 2019, claiming that a man named “Jeff” from Hilton Head, South Carolina, raped her there in the 1980s when she was about 13 years old. The woman told investigators she did not know the man’s identity at the time, but decades later she concluded the man was Jeffrey Epstein after a friend texted her a photo from a news article.
In a follow-up interview a month later, the woman added a number of other allegations, including claiming that Epstein planned to send her mother to prison, beat her, arranged sexual encounters with other men, and once flew her to New Jersey or New York, where she bit Donald Trump, who attempted to sexually assault her.
Investigators met with the woman two more times, at one point asking for details about her interactions with Trump, but the woman refused to answer additional questions and reported that she had cut off contact. There is no evidence that Mr. Epstein lived in South Carolina, and it is unclear whether Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein knew each other at the time.
The woman’s report was one of many unsubstantiated and sometimes fanciful reports federal officials received from members of the public alleging misconduct by Trump and other celebrities in the months and years after Epstein’s arrest.
