DOJ says upcoming Epstein files drop has 'sensationalist claims against Trump'

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department wants the American people to know that the still-unreleased files of the late Jeffrey Epstein contain “sensationalist claims against Trump.”

The Justice Department officials previously said some files included fake or false materials that were sent to the FBI by the public and may “contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump.”

“The US justice department [sic] is to release nearly 50,000 ‘missing’ Jeffrey Epstein files this week,” reported The Times on Wednesday. “The documents, which are referred to in the tranche released in late January but appear to have been withheld by the department, potentially contain unverified claims about President Trump, including FBI reports detailing a woman’s unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct against him.”

Specifically, the files are supposed to contain FBI memos summarizing an interview with a woman who came forward after Epstein was arrested in 2019. During that conversation, the woman said she had been sexually assaulted by both Epstein and Trump in the mid-1980s when she was a minor.

Despite these allegations, a White House spokesperson told The Times that “just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.”

Even some of Trump’s fellow Republicans have turned on him on the issue of the Epstein files, including Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

“Release the documents,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Redact the names of the victims. Don’t release photographs, naked or otherwise, of minors. Release the documents. This is not going to go away until there is full disclosure.”

Kennedy continued, “This is not going away until there’s full disclosure and the American people want to know, and they’re entitled to know, who if anyone, did Epstein traffic these women to … and why they weren’t prosecuted.”

Trump’s relationship with Epstein goes back to 1985, when the former purchased his Mar-a-Lago estate near Epstein in Florida. By 1989, Trump was attending a party on a yacht called Lady Ghislaine after Epstein’s associate and billionaire Robert Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell. In 1992 Trump and Epstein were recorded by NBC News partying with Buffalo Bills cheerleaders and other guests, including many young girls. At one point Trump and Epstein stare at girls on the dance floor and Trump appears to say “Look at her, back there.... she’s hot.” They continued to regularly socialize through the 1990s and 2000s.

According to CNN’s Aaron Blake, Trump’s attempts to bury the scandal have only elevated its profile.

“In a statement, the White House called the allegations against Trump ‘false and sensationalist’ and pointed to a previous DOJ statement that ‘some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump,’” Blake wrote. “But the plausibility of the woman’s claims isn’t the main point; the point is that an increasingly politicized Justice Department — one where a massive banner of Trump was hung last week — did not release documents containing allegations about the president.”

He added, “In a vacuum, that would be problematic. But next to everything else, it’s really bad.”