The Justice Department on Thursday published FBI interview records with a woman who alleged Donald Trump sexually assaulted her as a teenager after being introduced to him by Jeffrey Epstein. The files had been held back from the Epstein document release, with the Department claiming they were "incorrectly coded as duplicative" and therefore inadvertently withheld.
The White House wasted no time responding. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the allegations what they appear to be:
"Completely baseless, backed by zero credible evidence, from a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history."
The allegations are not new to investigators. The FBI spoke to the woman four times between August and October 2019, after Epstein's arrest. The Biden Justice Department sat on these files for four years and never acted on them. Leavitt drove this point home:
"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."
That's the Biden DOJ, the same apparatus that pursued Trump with every prosecutorial tool available, from special counsels to novel legal theories. If these claims had any evidentiary weight, they would have been weaponized long ago.
The woman told FBI agents that a man named "Jeff" raped her in Hilton Head, South Carolina in the early 1980s, when she was around 13 years old. She alleged Epstein later took her to New York or New Jersey, to what she described as "a very tall building with huge rooms," where she said Epstein introduced her to Trump, Daily Mail reports.
The FBI files contain no information about how the alleged incident ended or how the woman left. She could not recall who else was present. There is no indication Epstein ever lived in South Carolina, and the source material notes no evidence that Epstein and Trump knew each other in 1983, at least four years before the President has acknowledged becoming acquainted with the financier.
It remains unclear what became of the FBI's investigation into the woman's claims. Only a summary of one of the interviews had previously been included in the broader file release. The DOJ noted in January that these were "untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election."
Submitted right before an election. Investigated across four interviews. Never acted on. Then buried in a coding error for months while three million other Epstein files went public. The timeline speaks for itself.
Congressional Democrats have seized on the delayed release to build a case against Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was subpoenaed by Congress on Wednesday. Rep. Shri Thanedar introduced articles of impeachment against her on Thursday, charging obstruction of Congress and dereliction of duty.
Rep. Jamie Raskin told reporters that Bondi is "a central part" of what he called "a culture of lawlessness and chaos in the Cabinet" and placed her "at the heart of the Epstein cover-up." Rep. Robert Garcia, the Oversight Committee's ranking member, labeled her "the most high-profile member of the Cabinet that is involved in corruption."
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries named Bondi and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as the two who have "got to go," vowing to pursue both "with the same intensity that has now led to the termination of Kristi Noem."
Notice the pattern. Democrats are not demanding accountability for the people in Epstein's actual orbit. They are using Epstein files as ammunition against the current administration's officials. The cover-up they allege is a coding error the Department itself identified and corrected. The corruption they cite is the release of files that, by their own argument, undermine Trump. If Bondi were truly orchestrating a cover-up, these documents would still be buried.
The Republican-led committee investigating the DOJ's handling of the Epstein files has taken a broader approach. Last week, the committee grilled Bill and Hillary Clinton in depositions. Lawmakers are now pushing to interview Bill Gates. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick agreed to testify before the Oversight Committee after a DOJ-released photo showed him on Epstein's private island, Little St James.
These are the threads that matter. The Epstein case has always been about the powerful people who surrounded a predator and the institutions that shielded them. The rollout of files began in December after Congress overwhelmingly voted to release them. By the end of January, the Department had announced the release of more than three million documents.
Three million files. And the entire Democratic messaging apparatus has narrowed its focus to one set of uncorroborated claims against one person, the same person the Biden DOJ already declined to pursue based on the same material.
Jeffrey Epstein was found hanged in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The only co-conspirator behind bars is British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence. A compensation program paid out more than 130 settlements to those who came forward.
One person is serving time. Over 130 settlements were paid. The gap between those two numbers represents the actual cover-up: the network of enablers, participants, and silent beneficiaries who have never faced a single consequence.
Democrats don't want to talk about that gap. They want to talk about Pam Bondi. They want impeachment articles and cable news segments and the word "cover-up" attached to the current administration rather than to the decades of institutional failure that let Epstein operate in plain sight.
The files are out. The unverified allegation is public. The Biden DOJ reviewed it and walked away. The question worth asking isn't why these documents took an extra few weeks to surface. It's why, after all the files and all the depositions and all the settlements, Ghislaine Maxwell remains the only person in a cell.