I wrote about this story broken by Roger Sollenberger briefly yesterday but the story has now been confirmed by NPR and MS NOW and it’s big:
The Justice Department has withheld some Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor, an NPR investigation finds. It also removed some documents from the public database where accusations against Jeffrey Epstein also mention Trump.
Some files have not been made public despite a law mandating their release. These include what appear to be more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor.
NPR reviewed multiple sets of unique serial numbers appearing before and after the pages in question, stamped onto documents in the Epstein files database, FBI case records, emails and discovery document logs in the latest tranche of documents published at the end of January. NPR’s investigation found dozens of pages that appear to be catalogued by the Justice Department but not shared publicly.
The Justice Department declined to answer NPR’s questions on the record about these specific files, what’s in them and why they are not published. After publication, the Justice Department reached out to NPR, taking issue with how its responses to questions were framed. Department of Justice spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre reiterated DOJ’s stance that any documents not published are privileged, are duplicates or relate to an ongoing federal investigation.
[…]
Other files scrubbed from public view pertain to a separate woman who was a key witness for the prosecution in the criminal trial of Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking. Maxwell is seeking clemency from Trump.
Some of those documents were briefly taken down and put back online last week, while others remain hidden, according to NPR’s comparison of the initial dataset from Jan. 30 with document metadata of those files currently on the Justice Department website.
What is the allegation?
The woman who testified in the Maxwell trial testified that Epstein took her to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago when she was 14 years old. There’s more to that but we don’t know what it is.
This article from 2016 outlines a bunch of other allegations of Trump doing exactly the same kind of behavior with minor girls. What seemed kind of outlandish 10 years ago doesn’t seem so today, does it?
I will just remind everyone of this excerpt from a 1993 book recounting Ivana Trump’s deposition testimony in their divorce case:
