Nearly 50 pages were missing from the released data from the investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This raised suspicions that they were being hidden for the sake of President Trump. Now they have been published. What is in them?
The US Department of Justice has published more documents from the investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019, in which Donald Trump's name is now mentioned. According to the ministry, during a previous review, the documents were “incorrectly coded twice“ and therefore were not published together with the other documents of the investigation, ARD points out.
Previously, the media revealed that the published documents in the case did not contain all the materials on the “Epstein” case. This gave rise to assumptions that data from the interrogations that could incriminate the current US President Donald Trump were being deliberately concealed.
What do the new documents contain?
In 2019, the FBI questioned a witness four times who claimed to have been sexually abused by both Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. At the time, she was a minor – when she was raped, she was between 13 and 15 years old.
However, the published documents initially included only a summary of one of these interrogations. The Justice Department explained that a mistake had been made - the documents were mistakenly marked as duplicates, which is why they are only being published now, according to the Agence France-Presse.
According to a transcript of the interrogations conducted by the FBI, the witness stated that Epstein took her "either to New York or New Jersey" and introduced her to Trump. She bit Trump when he tried to force her to perform oral sex. For years, she and those close to her received threatening phone calls to keep her quiet about the incidents.
Trump did everything possible to prevent the files from seeing the light of day
Many facts surrounding the case suggest that Trump and Epstein had a close relationship. However, no violations by the American president have been proven so far. Trump claims he broke up with the financier before he was convicted of sexual assault in a Florida trial in 2008.
For months last year, Trump resisted the release of the “Epstein” files - before Congress, with the support of Republicans, forced them.
Epstein has more than 1,000 victims
According to the FBI and the US Department of Justice, Epstein is accused of abusing more than a thousand underage girls and young women. In some cases, he is alleged to have procured them for celebrities. The multimillionaire Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting a minor for prostitution. However, after a controversial plea deal with prosecutors, he served only about 13 months of his sentence.
In July 2019, Epstein was arrested again and charged in federal court with abusing numerous other victims. On August 10, 2019, he was found dead in his New York prison cell. Official reports say he committed suicide.