[DRAFT for Stephen Fowler, NPR. Pre-drafted from document analysis. All claims sourced to specific EFTAs. Brackets indicate places needing NPR verification, DOJ response, or editorial judgment.]
The Justice Department has quietly added more than 1,000 pages of new documents to its Epstein files database, including three of the FBI interviews that NPR previously identified as missing from the public release.
The documents appeared on justice.gov on or around March 5 with no public announcement. They include the FBI’s interviews with a woman who accused President Trump of sexual assault when she was a minor, interviews in which she describes the alleged assault in graphic detail for the first time in the public record.
But the release is partial. Of the 53 pages NPR identified as missing, only 16 have been published. The remaining 37 pages, all agent interview notes, are still withheld.
[DOJ response needed: Were these released in response to NPR’s reporting? Congressional pressure? Routine update?]
The three newly released FBI interviews, conducted between August and October 2019, contain the woman’s detailed account of what she says happened when Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump in the early 1980s.
In Interview #2, conducted August 7, 2019, the woman told FBI agents that Epstein brought her to either New York or New Jersey when she was between 13 and 15 years old. She was “introduced to someone with money, money… It was Donald Trump,” according to the FBI’s FD-302 report.
Trump didn’t like her “from the get-go” because she was a “boy-girl,” she told agents, meaning a tomboy. She said Trump asked everyone to leave the room, mentioned something to the effect of “Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be,” unzipped his pants and pushed her head toward his penis.
She “bit the shit out of it,” the FBI report reads.
Trump struck her and said words to the effect of “get this little bitch the hell out of here,” according to the document. Afterward, a blonde woman approached her and said, “let me give you a tip little girl about your breasts, wear a bra every night.”
The woman told agents she had two additional interactions with Trump that she asked to discuss at a later date.
In Interview #3, conducted August 20, she clarified that when she previously said Trump struck her, he “pulled her hair and punched her on the side of her head.” She described decades of threatening phone calls she attributed to Epstein’s associates, calls that intensified during Trump’s presidential campaign. Her attorney interjected at one point: “more tracks to cover.”
By Interview #4, on October 16, the woman asked agents “what’s the point?” She was aware the statute of limitations had likely expired. The agents asked her to go home and think about whether she wanted to continue. The interview ended there.
[Note: Interview #1, conducted July 24, 2019, was already in the public database as EFTA01245620. It describes Epstein’s abuse in detail but does not mention Trump.]
NPR’s original investigation identified 53 missing pages by tracing three sets of serial numbers stamped onto documents in the Epstein files. The newly released interviews account for 16 of those pages.
The remaining 37 pages correspond to agent interview notes, according to a Maxwell case prosecution disclosure index that catalogs the full contents of this witness’s sub-file. The index lists 15 sub-documents for this witness. Eight are now public. Seven are not.
The three missing sets of notes total 15, 18, and 4 pages respectively, based on gaps in the secondary Bates numbering system stamped on each page. The 18-page gap is particularly notable: it represents the agent’s notes from Interview #2, the session where the woman described the Trump encounter, blackmail by an associate named Jim Atkins, and hearing Trump discuss “washing money through casinos.”
[These notes could contain agent observations about her credibility, follow-up leads they planned to pursue, or unredacted identifying details that were sanitized in the formal FD-302 reports.]
The new documents go well beyond the Trump-related interviews.
Five internal prosecution memos from the Southern District of Florida reveal, in complete detail, the federal case against Epstein that was abandoned in favor of the 2008 Non-Prosecution Agreement. The earliest memo, dated April 23, 2007, proposed a 60-count federal indictment.
The proposed charges included 9 sex trafficking counts carrying mandatory minimums of 15 years to life. The memos named 19 victims, ages 14 to 17, and enumerated 225 overt acts. Prosecutors sought forfeiture of Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion and both his aircraft, the Boeing 727 and Gulfstream, through his shell corporations JEGE Inc. and Hyperion Air Inc.
Epstein was classified as an “extremely high flight risk” with a fortune exceeding $1 billion. The line prosecutor recommended refusing any pre-indictment interview to prevent him from fleeing.
The FBI had intelligence on Epstein’s whereabouts for May 16-17, 2007. The plan was to present a sealed indictment on May 15 and arrest him. That never happened.
Tracked across four successive versions of the prosecution memo, the case shrank. By September 2007, corporate defendants were removed and travel counts dropped from roughly 34 to 4. By February 2008, several victims were cut for “strategic reasons,” including the original complainant whose parents first went to police. On June 30, 2008, the NPA was signed: all federal charges dropped, a state plea to two counts of solicitation, 18 months in county jail with work release, and blanket immunity for all named and unnamed co-conspirators.
One detail from the memos stands out. After FBI agents attempted to interview Epstein’s assistant Leslie Groff, she went upstairs “claiming she needed to change her baby” but instead called Epstein, who rerouted his flight to avoid agents planning to serve target letters. The prosecutor noted: “After this meeting with Groff, Epstein’s team began negotiating in earnest to end this investigation.”
[This is the first time the complete internal prosecution case has been publicly available. Previous reporting on the NPA relied on partial documents and the 2018 Miami Herald investigation. These memos show, memo by memo, how the case was dismantled.]
A separate FBI interview in the new batch documents a Brazilian woman’s account of being sent by Epstein to have sex with other men.
She told agents Epstein sent her to former Sen. George Mitchell at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles. Mitchell was on the phone with Epstein when she arrived. He asked for a massage, then oral sex, then intercourse. Epstein later sent her to Mitchell again at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C.
The same woman described being sent to Leon Black, the billionaire Apollo Global Management co-founder, at a “big house” in New York. She said she saw Black four times in 2004.
She also described massaging Prince Andrew’s back at Epstein’s New York home while Epstein took photographs.
[Mitchell has previously denied any inappropriate conduct. Black paid $158 million to settle with Epstein’s accusers in 2021. Note: this witness was 27 at the time of recruitment, not a minor.]
Three documents from the prosecution of Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, the Metropolitan Correctional Center guards on duty the night Epstein died, include what appear to be the first publicly available grand jury transcripts from that case.
A prosecution presentation summarized the investigation’s findings: every institutional count the night of August 9-10, 2019, was fabricated. The 4pm, 10pm, midnight, 3am, and 5am counts were all signed as completed without being performed. Video confirmed no one approached the entrance to Epstein’s tier between approximately 10:30pm and 6:33am, an 8-hour gap.
Noel browsed furniture sales websites. Thomas browsed motorcycle listings. Both appeared to sleep for about 2 hours. Noel falsified more than 75 separate 30-minute round entries.
Thomas told investigators: “We messed up. I messed up, she’s not to blame, we didn’t do any rounds.”
[Both guards entered a deferred prosecution agreement in 2021 and were never convicted.]
The largest single document in the release is a 582-page FBI case file for the original Miami/Palm Beach investigation, case number 31E-MM-108062.
It spans July 2006 through March 2015, but the active investigation lasted only about 8 months before one of the case agents was transferred to FBI headquarters. The file contains interviews with Epstein’s household staff (chief pilot Larry Visoski, pilot David Rogers, chef David Mullen, butler Alfredo Rodriguez, houseman Janusz Banasiak), 20 to 25 victim interviews, and a complete subpoena sub-file covering phone carriers, airlines, social media companies, banks, and even a flower shop.
One interview was cut short in real time. FBI agents interviewing Brice Gordon at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico were interrupted by a phone call from the “main office.” The interview ended.
[The file contains no FD-302s. All interviews are documented as Electronic Communications (FD-1057s) with synopses rather than verbatim Q&A. This is unusual for a case of this magnitude.]
A Banasiak interview states that after the October 2005 search warrant, the Palm Beach house was renovated over 6 to 8 months. “Walls and floor rebuilt” while Epstein was absent.
An FBI tactical intelligence report from March 2020 confirms that the same SDNY team coordinating the Epstein investigation was also investigating Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard for sex trafficking involving minors at his Bahamas compound.
Several victim interviews describe Trump in passing. A Chilean woman told the FBI that on her third visit to Epstein, he was on a speakerphone call with Donald Trump when she entered the massage room. A massage therapist who worked for Epstein from 1993 to 1999 told agents she massaged “Donald Trump’s feet” on a plane from Palm Beach to New York.
The 23 documents, totaling 1,046 pages, carry EFTA numbers far outside the range of the original Dataset 12 release (which ended at EFTA02731783). The new numbers extend to EFTA02858497, suggesting they were numbered for a separate production batch.
They appeared on justice.gov under the same Dataset 12 URL path used for the January 30 release, but there was no press release, no update to the DOJ’s Epstein files disclosure page, and no notification to researchers or journalists tracking the production.
NPR published its investigation into the missing 53 pages on February 24. Both Republican and Democratic members of Congress announced investigations into the DOJ’s handling of the files on February 25. The new documents appeared roughly 9 days later.
[DOJ response: Ask specifically whether these documents were added in response to NPR’s reporting and/or congressional pressure. Ask why there was no public announcement. Ask about the 37 pages of agent notes that remain unpublished.]
[White House response needed.]
[Editorial notes for Stephen:]
1. The woman designated PROTECT SOURCE has never been publicly identified. The FBI assessed her safety was at risk. She described decades of threatening calls and multiple attempts to run her car off Interstate 5. Handle accordingly.
2. The secondary Bates math is airtight: Interview #1 ends at EFTA 00057715, the next published document in the sub-file picks up at EFTA 00057769. That’s exactly 53 pages. The three newly released interviews fill secondary Bates 00057731-00057740, 00057759-00057762, and 00057767-00057768, which is 16 pages. The three gaps (15 + 18 + 4 = 37 pages) correspond to agent interview notes listed in the Maxwell prosecution disclosure index (EFTA00095751, page 7) as sub-documents 3501.045-002, -004, and -006.
3. The Operation Leap Year memos are, I think, genuinely new to reporting. The Miami Herald’s Julie Brown broke the NPA story, but she worked from partial documents and victim interviews. These are the actual internal prosecution memos showing the full 60-count indictment with the arrest plan. The four versions show, revision by revision, how the case was sanded down. Worth its own piece, probably.
4. All 23 documents are downloadable at https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2012/EFTA{NUMBER}.pdf (requires age verification cookie). A full inventory with page counts and categories is in the attached briefing.
5. The George Mitchell/Leon Black interview (EFTA02857849) is the first FBI 302 I’m aware of where a witness describes being sent by Epstein to service specific named individuals. Previous reporting on Mitchell and Black came from civil depositions and lawsuits. This is an FBI interview under penalty of 18 USC 1001.