The Justice Department said it had released some Epstein files that had been mistakenly withheld, including FBI documents detailing a woman’s unverified allegations of sexual misconduct against President Trump .
A review found that the documents that referenced Trump were incorrectly marked as duplicates, one of four categories under which the law allowed the department to withhold or redact files, officials said.
“After this was brought to our attention, we reviewed the entire batch with the similar coding and discovered 15 documents were incorrectly coded as duplicative,” the Justice Department said in a social-media post.
It also released five prosecution memos from the Epstein investigation in the Southern District of Florida that reviewers had initially withheld as privileged.
The newly released files include Federal Bureau of Investigation notes documenting a series of interviews the woman gave to agents in 2019 in which she alleged she was abused by Trump and Jeffrey Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s. They also include an intake form documenting the initial call to the FBI’s threat center from a friend relaying the claims.
The Wall Street Journal reviewed copies of the documents earlier this week. Trump has denied wrongdoing and said the Epstein files “totally exonerated” him.
The Justice Department included a summary of the woman’s allegations when it released millions of Epstein files in January and a so-called Form 302 from her first interview in which she alleged Epstein abused her in South Carolina. But it hadn’t released three other Form 302s, including the interviews in which she discussed Trump, raising questions about why they weren’t made public as required under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
“As we have consistently done, if any member of the public reported concerns with information in the library, the Department would review, make any corrections, and republish online,” the department said.
Justice Department officials have come under sustained criticism for their handling of the files, including inconsistent redactions that exposed the names of dozens of Epstein victims and initially kept some prominent men’s names hidden.
The House Oversight Committee this week voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to compel her to testify about the department’s investigation of Epstein and its release of the files.
The department this week also republished a tranche of thousands of documents that were taken offline after officials discovered a batch within them contained many nude images. An official said they were temporarily removed out of an abundance of caution and were being reviewed and then reposted.
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com
