Democrats on the House Oversight Committee accused the Justice Department of potentially withholding and removing "Epstein files" documents related to President Donald Trump, including allegations he sexually abused a minor.
Representative Robert Garcia, the committee's top Democrat, said the panel's Democratic members had spent weeks "investigating the FBI's handling of allegations from 2019 of sexual assault on a minor made against President Donald Trump by a survivor."
"Yesterday, I reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the Department of Justice. Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes. Oversight Democrats will open a parallel investigation into this," he said.
"Covering up direct evidence of a potential assault by the President of the United States is the most serious possible crime in this White House cover up," he added.
The NPR radio broadcaster earlier reported that the Justice Department withheld the files, saying they include roughly 50 pages of FBI interviews and notes with the woman who accused Trump of abusing her when she was a minor.
NPR said it reviewed "multiple sets of unique serial numbers appearing before and after the pages in question," and that those pages have been catalogued by the Justice Department, but have not been disclosed publicly despite a law mandating that they be published.
The radio network did not name the woman due to an internal policy of not naming victims of sexual abuse.
The woman accused Trump of abusing her when she was around 13 years old, around 1983, shortly after Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to the real estate developer-turned US president, according to NPR.
On Jan. 30, the US Justice Department released more than 3 million pages of documents, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed into law last November after Trump relented amid bipartisan pressure.
Those materials include grand jury transcripts and investigative records, though many pages remain heavily redacted. Epstein survivors and victims' relatives say the disclosure falls short of what the law requires and omits vital information.
Authorities found Epstein dead by suicide in a New York City jail in 2019 while he was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges involving underage girls.
