Dozens of FBI witness interviews from the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein appear to be missing from the massive trove of files released by the Department of Justice last month, according to a CNN review – including three interviews related to a woman who accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her decades ago.
An evidence log provided to attorneys for Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell includes serial numbers for about 325 FBI witness interview records – but more than 90 of those records, over a quarter of the list, don’t appear to be present on the DOJ website, according to CNN’s review.
Among those missing records are three interviews related to a woman who told agents that Epstein had repeatedly abused her starting when she was approximately 13 years old, and who also accused Trump of sexually assaulting her.
A Democratic lawmaker on Tuesday pointed to the apparently missing documents to question the extent of DOJ’s release and whether the Trump administration followed the law mandating the agency publish its files related to Epstein, the wealthy financier who died in a federal jail in 2019 while facing sex trafficking charges.
“We have a survivor that made serious allegations against the president,” Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told CNN. “But there’s a series of documents, and it would appear to be possible interviews, that the FBI conducted with the survivor that are actually missing, that we don’t have access to.”
Trump has consistently denied wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. In a statement, the White House called the allegations against Trump “false and sensationalist” and pointed to a previous DOJ statement that “some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump.”
A DOJ spokesperson denied that any Epstein records had been deleted and stressed that the department was following the law.
“We have not deleted anything, and as we have always said, all documents responsive were produced,” the spokesperson said. Documents not included in the release were either “duplicates, privileged, (or) part of an ongoing federal investigation,” the spokesperson said. They did not answer follow-up questions about specific files.
It’s possible that some of the documents referred to in the Maxwell evidence logs could be present elsewhere in the files without the serial numbers listed on the logs, or with those serial numbers redacted.
Many documents have also been removed and added back to the DOJ’s Epstein files website over the weeks since the initial release. Last week, CNN’s analysis found that about a dozen additional interview reports were also missing, but those were available online as of Tuesday afternoon. One of the two evidence logs was also offline last week but is now accessible again. The DOJ spokesperson said that it was “temporarily removed for victim redactions.”
Several Epstein victims have said that they’ve scoured the DOJ’s website in recent weeks for files documenting their own interviews with the FBI – only to come up empty handed.
“All of us have been looking for our victim statements,” Jess Michaels, who was assaulted by Epstein when she was 22 years old, after the file release. Heavily redacted and missing interview reports suggest that “this Department of Justice is actually gaslighting the entire country,” Michaels argued.
Buried in the more than 3 million pages of files released by the DOJ is a set of documents that federal prosecutors provided to attorneys for Maxwell in advance of her 2021 sex trafficking trial.
Those records include hundreds of FBI memos known as “302” files that document interviews, as well as other materials related to dozens of witnesses, some of whom testified at the trial, according to two evidence logs included in the DOJ release.
Experts said they were concerned about the apparently missing 302s because they are key to understanding the FBI’s yearslong investigation into Epstein and Maxwell. Typically, 302s lay out what an interviewee told agents, but don’t include other corroborating information or agents’ opinions.
Details about most of the missing 302 documents, including the identity of the people interviewed, are largely redacted from the evidence logs.
But some of the missing interview records appear to be related to a witness who accused Trump of sexual assault.
