Summary: The US Justice Department released FBI documents containing a woman's allegations that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager, facilitated by Jeffrey Epstein. The documents, previously withheld as "duplicative," detail her 2019 interviews with the FBI, where she also reported receiving threats. Trump and the White House have denied the claims as baseless, and some analysts suggest the recent war on Iran has shifted public and media attention away from the Epstein files.
Main Topics Covered:
1. The release of FBI documents containing sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
2. The political context, including Democratic investigations and Republican responses.
3. The shifting media and public focus from the Epstein case to the war on Iran.
Epstein files with claims against Trump released by US Justice Department
Documents summarise interviews with an unidentified woman making accusations against US president over an alleged sexual encounter when she was aged between 13 and 15.
The United States Justice Department has published additional FBI documents, describing interviews with a woman who said President Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager after she was introduced to him by late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The documents had not been made public under previous congressionally mandated file releases related to Epstein, the disgraced financier, because they were mistakenly marked “duplicative”, the department said on Thursday.
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Democrats are investigating the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files.
The documents released on Thursday include descriptions of multiple 2019 interviews the FBI held with the woman, who alleged she was assaulted by Epstein and Trump while she was aged between 13 and 15 years old.
In one interview, the woman said Epstein took her to “either New York or New Jersey” and introduced her to Trump. She told investigators that she bit Trump as he attempted to force her to perform oral sex on him.
The woman said she and people close to her received threatening calls over the years demanding she keep quiet, which she believed were related to Epstein.
Interviews stopped
FBI records reportedly suggest agents stopped speaking with her in 2019. In the report of the woman’s final interview, conducted in October 2019, during Trump’s first presidency, agents asked whether she would be willing to provide more information about Trump.
In response, the agent wrote, she “asked what the point would be of providing the information at this point in her life when there was a strong possibility nothing could be done about it”.
Politico, the US publication which first reported the disclosures, said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the woman’s claims “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence”.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing related to the Epstein allegations, and the Justice Department previously said some of the documents it has released “contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump”.
Before the US and Israel launched their war on Iran five days ago, the fallout from files released by the US Department of Justice on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was reverberating around the world.
But all those revelations have sharply shifted once the bombs started raining down on Iran.
On Sunday, Republican US Congressman Thomas Massie, who helped push the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act through Congress last year, said, “bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away”. He has also been critical of the war.
Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, an analyst with Atlas Global Strategies and a former Israeli diplomat, has told Al Jazeera that Trump “really needs a distraction from [his domestic issues] in the form of a war”.
“And if you look at searches on Google for the Epstein files, they’ve plummeted since this started. So, at least temporarily, it’s succeeding. It’s taking up Congress’s time and it’s taking up the media’s time,” he added.
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