Why Did DOJ Give Ghislaine Maxwell These Epstein Files on Trump?

The FBI conducted four interviews with a woman who accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her as a child, and Trump’s Justice Department gave all four of those interviews to Ghislaine Maxwell before her trial, as reported by Roger Sollenberger. Only one of those interviews is in the publicly searchable Epstein files—and it was removed and put back earlier this week.

“By choosing not to release three FBI interviews with an underage Trump accuser—interviews the DOJ gave to Maxwell at trial—Trump’s DOJ allowed Maxwell to retain potential blackmail over the president,” Sollenberger wrote Friday on X. “But that leverage over Trump vanishes if DOJ made them public, as law requires.”

The woman sat down for the interviews with the FBI after filing a lawsuit against the Epstein estate. In the publicly available interview, she claims that she was “brutally and forcibly battered, assaulted, and raped by these other men she met through Epstein. On one occasion, one of these prominent men forcibly slapped Jane Doe 4 in the face after she was forced to perform oral sex on him. This same man forcibly raped her, penetrating her both vaginally and anally. On information and belief, Epstein was aware of and, indeed encouraged, the assault of Jane Doe 4 by these other men.”

This lawsuit matches the FBI’s lone public interview with her, in which she names Trump.

“[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit,” the FBI said. “In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.” This allegedly occurred in the mid-1980s when she was “approximately 13-15 years old.”

Trump has of course denied any wrongdoing.

There are three more interviews that this woman has with the FBI, and we don’t know what else she says or who else she names. But Maxwell does.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s husband has been banned from the department’s headquarters in Washington after he allegedly sexually assaulted two female staffers, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Dr. Shawn DeRemer, a 57-year-old anesthesiologist from Portland, Oregon, will no longer be able to visit his wife at work, after at least two female staffers told officials that he touched them inappropriately. A building restriction notice viewed by the Times put it gently: “If Mr. DeRemer attempts to enter, he is to be asked to leave.”

One of the incidents, which occurred during working hours, was caught by security cameras, people familiar with the matter told the Times. The footage showed DeRemer giving a female staffer an extended embrace, and it was reviewed as part of a criminal investigation, one of the people told the paper.

A police report documenting a December incident of forced sexual conduct at the Labor Department was filed by Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department in late January.

Concerns about DeRemer were initially raised in January, as part of an internal investigation into alleged misconduct by his wife. In an explosive complaint to the Inspector General’s Office, Chavez-DeRemer was accused of abusing her position by having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a member of her security detail.

She was also accused of drinking during the workday and of committing travel fraud by making her chief of staff schedule official taxpayer-funded trips she could use to see friends and family. Her lawyer has denied these allegations.

The Trump administration has taken more than a year to roll out a fraction of the Epstein files, but literally overnight, Donald Trump decided that it would be no problem at all to dump everything the government has on alien life.

The president announced late Thursday that he would direct agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”

Trump noted the spontaneous release was due to the public’s “tremendous interest,” though that’s not the entire story.

Hours earlier, Trump was caught off guard by a reporter’s question relating to Barack Obama’s recent revelation that aliens are real.

“Have you seen any evidence of nonhuman visitors to earth?” Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Trump on Air Force One.

“Well, he gave classified information, he’s not supposed to be doing that,” said Trump, who was charged for mishandling and illegally keeping classified documents after losing the 2020 election.

“So aliens are real?” Doocy pressed.

“Well I don’t know if they’re real or not, I can tell you he gave classified information; he’s not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake,” Trump replied, cracking that the only aliens he was aware of in the U.S. were “illegals.”

Obama casually fessed to his belief in aliens during a speed round of playful questions on the No Lie With Brian Tyler Cohen podcast Saturday, informing listeners that “they’re real, but I haven’t seen them.” The former president added that there was no facility storing aliens at Area 51, “unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

He clarified his comments the following day, writing on social media that the universe is so vast that the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is “statistically” probable.

“But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!” Obama posted.

Trump’s eagerness to satiate apparent public demand on the existence of aliens only further underscores the absurdity of the endless delays holding back the full, legally mandated release of the Epstein files.

Recent reports indicate that the DOJ has only released a fraction of the Epstein files, potentially holding on to upward of 50 terabytes that the agency has not yet disclosed. The recent releases, which include millions of pages of documents, amount to roughly 300 gigabytes, or 2 percent of the estimated total.

President Trump is continuing his crusade against voting rights, claiming that mail-in ballots are “crooked as hell” and that eliminating them will guarantee Republican dominance of elections for the next half-century.

“Mail-in ballots are crooked as hell. We’re the only country in the world that use this type of mail-in ballot, the only country in the world,” Trump said at a rally in Rome, Georgia, on Thursday. “I’ll tell you what, Republicans have to win this one. We’ll never lose a race for fifty years, we won’t lose a race.”

He then launched into his broader attack on voting rights, which many see as a last-ditch attempt to salvage the GOP’s chances in the November midterm elections, which are predicted to go poorly for them.

“We want voter ID, we want proof of citizenship, and we don’t want mail-in ballots except for the military far away, except for people that are ill, disabled, or people that are away. Even for a vacation! We’ll be generous,” Trump added.

Trump had no complaints about mail-in ballots when he won the presidency in 2024. And the U.S. is not the only country to use them: 34 countries and territories use some kind of postal voting. Twelve even allow all voters to vote by mail, including the U.K., Germany, Poland, Greece, and Canada.

An Obama-era attorney disclosed “non-public” information to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein with regard to the White House’s response to the Secret Service’s sex scandal.

Kathryn Ruemmler works as Goldman Sachs’s chief legal officer, but last week, the star attorney was forced to resign over her myriad ties to the man she warmly referred to as “Uncle Jeffrey.” Her resignation goes into effect on June 30.*

But recently released emails from 2014 reveal that the counsel’s fondness for the “international man of mystery” inspired her to share a draft of an official White House press response with him, dishing then-unreleased information to the convicted sex criminal, reported Bloomberg Thursday.

At the time of her emails, the White House was embroiled in a global controversy: In 2012, more than a dozen Secret Service agents (and military men) had decided to booze their way through a presidential trip in Cartagena, Colombia, hiring prostitutes along the way. The elite law enforcement personnel did so, despite the fact that Colombian sex workers were frequently hired as spies by the country’s powerful drug cartels, sparking questions about possible national security concerns in the fallout.

Ruemmler was one of the staffers handling the White House’s official response to the fiasco. Two years after the disastrous Cartagena trip, she spoke with Epstein about the situation, forwarding him a draft email that contained sensitive information about the role that the White House played in investigating the sexual misconduct.*

In return, Epstein offered advice and edits. “Breathe, smile. You’re free,” he wrote in one message.

The exchange took place six years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting children as young as 14 to have sex with him. The Justice Department’s review of the Epstein files concluded that the well-connected financier had harmed more than 1,000 women and children in his global sex-trafficking ring, all of whom “suffered unique trauma.”

Jennifer Connelly, a spokeswoman for Ruemmler, told Bloomberg that the former White House counsel “has done nothing wrong and has nothing to hide. Nothing in the record suggests otherwise.”

“Ms. Ruemmler has deep sympathy for those harmed by Epstein and if she knew then what she knows now, she never would have dealt with him at all,” Connelly said.

Recent reports indicate that the DOJ has only released a fraction of the Epstein files, potentially holding onto upward of 50 terabytes that the agency has not yet disclosed. The recent releases, which include millions of pages of documents, amount to roughly 300 gigabytes, or 2 percent of the estimated total.

* This article previously misstated when Ruemmler’s work at Goldman Sachs ends, as well as the nature of her outreach to Epstein.