You’ve probably seen some hints of it. But I wanted to focus your attention on a genuine piece of news out of the Epstein Files, even weeks after their original release. In 2019, a woman came forward and spoke to the FBI claiming that Donald Trump had assaulted her in the early 1980s. In her allegations, Jeffrey Epstein essentially provided her to Trump. Other files in the Epstein trove say that the FBI conducted four interviews with the woman. But only one of them was released in the larger trove — one that detailed her accusations against Epstein. Meanwhile, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, says he went to view the unredacted version of the files that members of Congress can access and the missing interviews aren’t there either.
There have been other accusations against Trump in the files. But this one appears to be more specific and detailed. And there are various signs and reasons that the FBI took the allegations seriously: those reasons and details about the accusations are discussed in this NPR article once you get past the first few paragraphs. The accuser, according to one FBI note contained in the files, eventually refused to cooperate with the investigation.
It goes without saying that we shouldn’t impute guilt on the basis of an un-cross-examined, let alone unadjudicated, accusation. But this isn’t the first accusation for Trump. And if we assume that Trump was blameless in his longtime friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, he sure does have a lot of people coming forward to accuse him of things. Like seriously bad luck on that front. In this case, it seems overwhelmingly likely that these documents were hidden from public view or destroyed because of the damage they would do to Donald Trump. In that case, while we can’t say for certain whether the allegations have merit, the bad act of concealment likely speaks for itself.
It also speaks to the difficulty of these kinds of coverups. If someone suppressed those interview documents, they suppressed the interview notes themselves or the summaries. But there were other ledgers and documents that referred to those interview summaries. There has been extensive reporting on what a herculean task this was processing all these documents. The DOJ was roping in legal professionals from across the department to work on going through these files. But if you’re trying to cover up incriminating information as opposed to simply redacting sensitive material or names of the accused, that’s pretty complicated. You can do the basic stuff with keyword searches. But having a full view of where in the trove the deep-sixed documents might be referred to in an aside or a case ledger is going to be a lot more complicated. I suspect we have an example of that here.
Last point, but in a way the one I most want to share with you. This story has now been picked up in Times, NPR and, after yesterday, a bunch of other publications. But the guy who found it was Roger Sollenberger, who used to work at Daily Beast but has been an independent for a while. I don’t know Sollenberger personally and I don’t follow his work that closely. But again and again, though not that frequently, he comes up with pretty big stories. He’s also the guy who came up with the various scandals tied to Rep. Corey Mills and the crazy accommodations he had in DC. It’s an example of how really, really big stories can be unearthed by solo operators without the heft and legions of reporters they have at places like the Times.