A senior Democrat on the US House committee investigating Jeffrey Epstein has accused the US justice department of failing to release documents that contain allegations of sexual abuse of a minor involving Donald Trump.
Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said he personally reviewed files that remain undisclosed and that those records include allegations that have not appeared in the documents released to the public.
The justice department rejected the accusation, insisting that no material had been removed. In a statement, it said that documents had only been withheld if they were duplicates, legally privileged, or connected to an ongoing federal investigation.
Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing connected to Epstein and has said he has been “totally exonerated”.
The justice department has also previously warned that some of the Epstein files contain what it describes as “untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump”.
Responding to the controversy, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the president had taken unprecedented steps on behalf of Epstein’s victims.
“By releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for further investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him,” she said.
Epstein, who died in jail in 2019, had a long-running social relationship with Trump dating back to the late 1980s. Trump has said the two later fell out in the early 2000s, around two years before Epstein was first arrested.
The justice department has released millions of pages of material linked to federal investigations into Epstein. Those disclosures were made in stages, following legislation signed by Trump, despite his earlier resistance to releasing the files.
Some documents were published with redactions, and officials have acknowledged that others were withheld entirely. The law permits the justice department to retain files if their release could compromise active investigations, prosecutions, or the privacy of victims.
Garcia said the unreleased files he reviewed “make it clear” that a woman made “additional, specific allegations” against Trump that are absent from the publicly available records. He has written to Pam Bondi, demanding the documents be released.
Bondi’s department responded by accusing Democratic committee members of misleading the public and “manufacturing outrage from their radical anti-Trump base”. In a separate post on X, the department said it would review whether any documents had been improperly withheld.
As a member of Congress, Garcia is legally permitted to examine unredacted Epstein files at the justice department while the House Oversight Committee conducts its own inquiry.
“This is the largest government cover-up in modern history,” Democrats on the committee said in a statement. “We are demanding answers.”
Garcia’s letter followed US media reports that three FBI witness interview summaries involving an alleged Epstein victim were missing from the public archive.
NPR first reported that indexes and serial numbers suggested the FBI conducted four interviews with the woman in 2019 during its investigation into Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of sex trafficking and jailed in 2022.
However, three interview summaries and related notes — more than 50 pages in total — do not appear on the justice department’s website, according to NPR and reporting by New York Times.
One heavily redacted document states that the woman told federal agents Epstein raped her while she was a minor in the early 1980s.
Other entries in the files indicate that a woman — whom Garcia said is confirmed in unredacted documents to be the same accuser — alleged she was sexually abused by Trump between 1983 and 1985, when she would have been between 13 and 15 years old.
That allegation also appears in an FBI compilation of tips received through its national Threat Operation Center. While many entries in the document were dismissed as lacking credibility, investigators marked this particular allegation for follow-up and forwarded it to a Washington field office “to conduct interview”.
The justice department referred to a statement it issued following the January release of the Epstein files.
“Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” the statement said.
“To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
Searches of the justice department’s public Epstein database show no trace of the three additional FBI interview summaries, nor a photograph and two other documents listed in the file index.
There is nothing in the available material to suggest that investigators corroborated the woman’s allegations, or that they reached any conclusion about their credibility.
In his letter to Bondi, Garcia said the released files demonstrate that the FBI treated the allegations seriously. He accused the Trump administration of a deliberate cover-up by withholding related interviews.
A woman with matching biographical details was among several alleged Epstein victims who filed a civil lawsuit against Epstein’s estate in 2019. She alleged that Epstein trafficked her to New York in the 1980s, where she was raped by men connected to him, though the lawsuit did not name those men.
She later voluntarily dropped the case in 2021, according to a letter filed by her lawyer at the time. The lawyer declined to comment when contacted by the BBC.
Trump and Epstein were photographed together at multiple social events during the 1990s. In a 2002 interview with New York Magazine, Trump described Epstein as a “terrific guy” and remarked that “many of [the women he likes] are on the younger side”.
Trump’s name appears in the Epstein files released by the justice department, though officials stress that being mentioned does not imply wrongdoing.
Several released documents — including some made public by Democrats on the Oversight Committee — show Epstein discussing Trump in emails written years after their relationship ended.
In a 2011 message to Maxwell, Epstein wrote: “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump… [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him.”
At the time, the White House said the reference was to Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide earlier this year. It noted that Giuffre had repeatedly said Trump was not involved in wrongdoing and that he “couldn’t have been friendlier” during their limited interactions.
