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And since your series has started on your sub stack, we've now had NPR jump on this. We've had the House Oversight Dems put out a formal statement on this. Obviously, there's a lot of evidence here. And I appreciate that you were relentless, really, let's just be honest, and driving the story. So folks who haven't been following it, initial story was basically there's this underage accuser who included Trump rape allegations in her lawsuit against Epstein. Tell us what we know about that. Yeah, so it started because I found this claim in a DOJ slideshow, and the reporting has always bothered me that it's it seemed too deferential like trump has not been accused of wrongdoing not credibly accused of wrongdoing and in my mind it does seem like even before this like you know there's there's plenty of stuff well there's plenty of credible adult accusations that's what i always kind of want to chime in any anytime people like oh there's no credible accusations of wrongdoing like well i mean he admitted to sexual assault of women um on tape and uh he's in the civil trial has been adjudicated for for sexual assault and you know like he uh palled around with that right so like there's a lot of evidence of certain types of wrongdoing but it's this specific question about about underage girls yeah and you know to be completely honest like the the white house's you know statements and trump's bizarre back and forth statements and doj's statements it just seems like that stuff doesn't match like the public reporting just about his like his friendship with Epstein. I mean, he sues the Wall Street Journal for 10 billion bucks, right? So I was just wondering, like, well, maybe, you know, like, what if there is something in the files, like everybody else on the planet? And there is this slideshow, and it's from the DOJ, it's an FBI Child Sex Trafficking Task Force slideshow that they put together with the Violent Crimes Task Force. And it was last summer. And there were several drafts of this that are in the files that, again, all this reporting comes, it comes straight from the files. I don't have any secret documents, any secret sourcing or whatever. You can piece this together, right? And on that slideshow, there's a slide that says prominent names. And there are two bullet points for Trump. There's a bunch of Harvey Weinstein's on there, Jess Staley, Bill Clinton, Bill Barr, whatever, Howard Ludnick, Prince Andrew, tons of names. And then the first two though are Donald Trump. And the very first one is citing a woman directly telling the FBI, right? It says it's her and it has this claim of assault when she was a child, when she was between 13 and 14 years old. It's a pretty graphic accusation. It would have dated back to between 1983 and 1985. So an early accusation as well, especially when it comes to Epstein, that's an early accusation. Right. But she also claimed to be a victim of Epstein. And this accusation matches a tip that got called in to the FBI. And the way the DOJ rolled this stuff out is we got. A tip that got called in to the FBI when? Like at the time or also recently? In 2019. Yeah, 2019. We didn't know that previously. But so in December, we saw this, that sheet that has all these allegations against Donald Trump. Right. And the Justice Department preempted that release saying like, hey, these are, you know, false claims that have no merit, you know, and they're like, just be warned. And, you know, to be sure, like a lot of the claims on there are pretty outrageous. And the FBI actually notes that on the sheet. They say source deemed not credible. They look into all of them They tried to call people back The people they got in touch with they say not credible not probative you know like it documented on there except for one And it the first one on the sheet That the claim that is later on this DOJ slideshow right? Where this woman apparently tells the FBI. And I was like, when I saw that, I was like, what? The FBI did talk to somebody, right? The FBI, and that had never been reported. Now, To be clear, people have cited this in different ways, but I seem to be the first person to put it together that the FBI talked to her. Yeah. And again, to your point, it is just important to say, right? Especially at this point, 2019, Trump is president. He's famous. Sure, it's possible that somebody would do a false report to the FBI, right? Crazy people call the FBI and say crazy things all the time, right? It's just like the nature. We see it, you know? Yeah, we see that. So, you know, in this case, it's notable, I guess, let's say, in part because there's this other tip. And in part, I guess, talk a little bit more about how, you know, basically she didn't want to cooperate against Trump. They followed up and I wasn't just like, hey, there's this slideshow and here's this tip sheet. You know, there's a 302 form, which is an FBI write up of the interview with this woman who lawyered up immediately. right so she meets the fbi about two weeks or so maybe three weeks after the tip was first called in by her friend right whose first name is on the fucking sheet that they released by the way um and the they have this long interview and it's like nine pages and it's highly detailed and she gives you know it's all focused on on epstein we have other stuff from this woman that i saw like photographs that she provided. There are back and forth between this woman and her attorneys. You know, there are several files associated with her that seeing all this together, I'm like, oh, the FBI took this person seriously. This is regardless of whether the claim is true. And I'm not going there at all. I don't think anybody can speculate, but it's not helpful either way to speculate i i don't think and i mean absolutely be skeptical of the claim right but the fbi took it but in that interview they took it seriously but in that interview she's focused on epstein on epstein and then trump comes up in the interview and this is how you know she explains how i i learned how she learned about epstein right um she's like i didn't know basically i did not know who jeff epstein was until he got arrested in 2019 and my friend the one who called the tip and sent me this photo of jeff epstein next to donald trump right who this person had also told the friend about so she was like is this is this the jeff you know and she's like oh my god that's the guy who made my life uh a nightmare she tells the fbi right with her lawyer president under penalty of prison if she lies to the fbi and the the photograph comes up and the fbi hears them talking about this photograph and they say, hey, what's this photograph? What is this? And the word president comes up in their conversation, her and her lawyer. They hear, oh, president, what do you mean? And she kind of like freezes and she's like, well, she wants to crop the photo and she wants to crop somebody out of the photo. And the lawyer says that she wants to do this because the client does not want to implicate anybody who's powerful out of fear of retaliation. Not like, oh, we want to crop this person she doesn't have any idea about out of the photo. Some innocent person. Right. Got it. Right. So it's out of fear of retaliation. That's the one time he comes up. And that's all we have as far as her interviews go. But I reported that first story like, hey, yeah, the FBI did talk to somebody And they did take her seriously and seriously enough that that claim was not only there, but like it survived. And they put it at the top of this slideshow last summer. And there's like an email chain about this slideshow. It's pretty serious. And there's another email from last summer that says, you know, it's also in preparation for this slideshow on the same time. And there's a list of these prominent names. And it's for positive hits in the Epstein case. And only one name has anything written next to it, has any notes next to it. And it's the first name, Donald Trump. And it says, paraphrasing here, a victim reported abuse by Trump when she was a minor, but ultimately refused to cooperate. Now, I don't want to put too much emphasis on the word refuse. She's like, no, I don't want to do whatever. What that tells me is the FBI took it seriously enough that they at least considered opening a criminal investigation into Trump based on this woman account based on what she may have been able to corroborate By the way we don know you know it seems unlikely based on what she told us that yeah that there anything to corroborate this claim but that's not true necessarily because she has friends maybe at the time the fbi might be able to sure on another way around it right but that's what it is she refused to cooperate with the investigation later there's a uh a civil lawsuit against the epstein estate that this victim joins as Jane Doe No. 4, represented by Lisa Bloom. And in her section of the complaint, she includes the allegation about Trump. That's the same thing. It's clearly about Trump. It does not name him, but it appears in there as well. That lawsuit, she ultimately settled, reportedly received a financial payment. The Post and Courier in South Carolina reported that. she had been, you know, got some sort of money out of it. She did not qualify for the Epstein Victims Fund. And we don't know why, right? Because there are also just, you know, different levels of information that you have to be able to provide. We don't know, right? So none of this is probative or disprobative. Bulwark Takes is sponsored by Soul. I've been more mindful about eliminating anything that is affecting my health habits like my workouts, sleep, bedtime routines, and energy. So I've cut back on the evening glass of wine and instead I'm reaching for Sol's out-of-office gummies. They give me a light, happy buzz that the calories of the next day drag because I don't need my parenting skills dragged down. Sol makes feeling good simple. They make delicious hemp-derived CBD and THC products with precise dosing, clean ingredients, and formulations designed for predictable feel-good effects. 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The brother, I just want to mention briefly, since you also had a story about this, the accuser's brother was part of the January 6th riot at the Capitol. I can't say any more than that. But he was arrested. Yeah. In connection with the riot. I think that's just a notable data point. Then we get to the cover-up part of this. And that is that they've already, as you mentioned, kind of removed some of the information related to this victim. We had a statement today by Robert Garcia, who's part of the House Oversight Committee on the Democrats, who said yesterday he reviewed the unredacted evidence logs at the Department of Justice. Oversight Democrats can confirm the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor, the one we've been speaking about, who accused President Trump of heinous crimes. Oversight Dems will open a parallel investigation into this. So, yeah, this is where I think all the focus should be right. Right now. It's she didn't speak to the FBI just once. Right. We have one of those interviews. She spoke to them four times, you know, and all of those. so this is my reporting last week too, like all of those interviews, all four that we know of, there could be more, we don't know. Right. But four that were, they were handed over to Glenn Maxwell in 2021 as part of the discovery process in her to prepare for her trial. Right. And they were non-testifying witness statements. Right. So there's like just a ton of these documents that were provided to her and there's nothing, you know, untoward about that. That's just normal CYA stuff for any prosecution, right? But that means that – so I found this document that the Justice Department deleted from the websites. They restored after I reported it, right? They put it back up, but they pulled it down right after it was released. And this document is that evidence manifest. And it says like, okay, she got all four interviews. She got notes associated with three of those interviews. There may be notes with the fourth. We don't know. And we don have any of those We only have one And there are three that Ghislaine Maxwell has Wow Right That they did not release to the public So the idea there being like okay well Ghislaine has this information. I don't know what's in those. Stephen Fowler at NPR reported, he deduced that that adds up, that material, if you just cross-check different identifiers on those on those documents, that that adds up to 53 pages of information from their conversations with this accuser. 53 pages is a lot because that first interview was just nine pages, right? So nine times four is 36. This is 53. Those other interviews, it certainly looks. Nine times six. I'm doing second grade math now. So it's six times, right? four interviews right if all nine pages like the first one i'm saying those other interviews some of them must be way longer right yeah got it and so we don't know what was discussed in any of that stuff um and the justice department again by not giving it to the public in the release uh allowing gilane you know she keeps it she still has it that is still you could say as i reported potentially black male material depending on what is in those interviews we don't know but like that seems seems you know pretty pretty relevant to me yeah we should know and it's part of the cover-up and i guess the other thing is one thing we also know is that it's against the law and they're required by law it was a basically a unanimous vote of the congress uh to to release that information is that uh troy nails is that who um it wasn't troy it was my buddy down here in Louisiana. Clay Higgins, who is the one who wanted to protect the Epstein co-conspirators for whatever reason. You can go read his own rationale. All right. This is big. Obviously, you're still on this. We'll keep following it. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you think is relevant to get on? Yeah, I do want to say that the DOJ on Tuesday, when all this, you know, the mainstream started picking it up. The DOJ put out a response in response to that, the House Oversight statement, actually. And they said that all responsive documents have been produced. So three exceptions. One is a duplicate document, right? Two is documents protected by privilege. And three is documents that are related to an ongoing federal investigation. So if that is the explanation, right, then one, these documents, this DOJ determined were for some reason not responsive, even though they were handed over to Ghislaine as part of her trial, that certainly makes them responsive. Yeah. Right. Okay. So then let's go on from there. So it's, All right. With duplicates. OK, well, we know that they're duplicates because the DOJ actually said prosecutors told this judge in SDNY in December. They said, hey, the stuff we gave Ghislaine, we also have copies of all of it, obviously, in our FBI files. And those are not subject subject to this protective order that Ghislaine is fighting. Right. But the DOJ took the hard route in releasing those documents, releasing them, the ones that were under the protective order, not the actual FBI case files. And they say in that filing that those case files are not subject to the protective order or whatever. Like they have them and they can produce them. So, yeah, there are duplicates, but they also should fall under the EFTA, right? The Epstein Files Transparency Act. All right. So that's a duplicates issue. The other two possibilities are it would have to be an executive privilege, the privilege argument. I don't see how any of this could fall under attorney, client or lawyer. So they would have to cite that or they'd have to cite an ongoing federal investigation, which brings me back to Trump's old Bill Clinton tweet back in December. and who knows, right? Did they open up a sham investigation to say, well, these are part of that or whatever, or is there an ongoing investigation? We don't know. Their explanation, just what I'm saying is does not add up unless it's executive privilege or if there's an ongoing investigation to my, to my eye. All right. Well, I appreciate your reporting on this. We'll keep an eye on it. Everybody that wants more can follow you on Substack. Roger Sullenberger will put a link in the show notes here and we'll stay in touch. All right, brother, you go do some parenting my man yeah he's calling all right we'll see you later brother see you dude starting a business can be overwhelming you're juggling multiple roles designer marketer logistics manager all while bringing your vision to life shopify helps millions of business sell online build fast with templates and ai descriptions and photos inventory and shipping sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl that's shopify.nl it's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side.
