Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, And The Construction Of Political Crisis

Anyone can report anything they want to the FBI, which is why we don’t typically expect or allow law-enforcement officers to dump their case files on to the internet.

Some people are vindictive, some people are mentally unwell. Agents field farfetched accusations all the time, take notes as disturbed people rattle off delusions—and for the most part, the rest of us shouldn’t know about it. Not fair to the accuser, not fair to the accused.

The Jeffrey Epstein files, or the half of the files that the Justice Department has released thus far, contain plenty of this kind of documentation, including claims about Donald Trump that strain credulity. The Trump administration would like us to believe it’s all like this—at least as it pertains to Trump.

But it’s not true. Some of the accusations are credible.

The independent journalist Roger Sollenberger has been chasing down one particular accusation, which the FBI deemed credible, from a woman who:

• Approached the Justice Department in July 2019, before Epstein’s suicide, accompanied by a lawyer;

• Became one of Epstein’s underage victims as a teenager in the 1980s;

• Claimed that, when she was 13-15 years old, Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump “who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out”;

• Was reluctant to implicate Trump for fear of retaliation;

• Included an identical allegation against a “prominent, wealthy” New York man when she sued the Epstein estate in 2019;

• Provided three further interviews with the FBI; notes from which are missing from the DOJ’s Epstein file database, but which are in the possession of Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team.

• Received a settlement from the Epstein estate.

This accusation alone falsifies claims by Pam Bondi, Susie Wiles, and other senior Trump officials that, while Trump’s name is all over the Epstein files, the files contain no evidence that he did anything wrong. When Wiles told Vanity Fair, “we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful,” it was a lie. When Bondi told Congress, “there is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime,” it was perjurious.

And yet, for now at least, Sollenberger is way out ahead of his peers in mainstream news. They may catch up. But they are not inundating the