In late July, F.B.I. agents exchanged a flurry of early-morning emails about a sensitive task relating to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
An agent listed the names of 14 prominent men, with President Trump at the top, and gave direct instructions: “Take these names and build out new spreadsheet w all the derog on them,” referring to derogatory information found in the Epstein files.
That morning, agents prepared summaries of the “salacious statements” that tipsters and other interviewees had made against Mr. Trump and others. Their rundown on the president consisted of two bullet points. One was an allegation from a woman who said that he sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager. The other was a claim that Mr. Epstein once introduced a woman to Mr. Trump, saying, “This is a good one, huh?” with Mr. Trump replying, “Yes.”
These emails, part of the trove of investigative documents involving Mr. Epstein released by the government, show how the Justice Department scrambled last summer as the F.B.I. sought to understand what, exactly, its files said about Mr. Trump and others close to Mr. Epstein. It was an early sign of the department’s frantic effort to prepare the records for release.
But the department’s handling of the files has only fueled questions about its commitment to transparency, painting a portrait of an agency under intense political scrutiny that failed to make public key documents, even after officials sought to identify tips involving Mr. Trump.
The more than three million pages released in late January turned out to be messy and incomplete. Even as many tips appeared outlandish, the records that were, for a spell, missing were the ones that the original investigators seem to have taken most seriously, only furthering conspiracy theories and offering, at best, a fragmented account.
Under the law passed in November that forced the release of the files, the administration could redact information only in certain situations, including when information might compromise victims. But sometimes, the names of witnesses were left visible; in other instances, text and faces were blacked out. At one point, up to 76,000 documents were taken offline, while salacious, but uncorroborated, tips remained in the trove.
The agents ordered up the hastily written notes on July 24, the same day that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was in Florida to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s longtime companion, who was convicted on charges she conspired with him in abusing minors. Among the boldface names broached during the two-day interview with Ms. Maxwell: Mr. Trump and many of the other men on the list, including Bill Clinton; Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince; and the Wall Street billionaire Leon Black, according to transcripts.
In the days that followed, the F.B.I. converted the summaries on the prominent men into a slide that was part of a 21-page internal presentation on the Epstein case. In early August, an unclassified version of the presentation was shared with the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, the newly released emails suggest. A draft of the presentation released by the Justice Department exposed the names of alleged victims.
At the same time, emails show, F.B.I. agents were collating in a table a wider list of complaints that the agency had received about Mr. Trump. The F.B.I. had received many of the tips after Mr. Epstein’s arrest in July 2019, and the allegations mostly dated back decades. The table included about 15 claims relating to Mr. Trump, including sexual misconduct, and the agents highlighted most of the complaints in bright yellow, deeming them “salacious.”
The agents circulated the table in a series of emails on Aug. 6 and 7, noting that some of the leads appeared to include secondhand information. It is unclear from the emails why the complaints were compiled.
When one agent asked about what the F.B.I. did to follow up on the leads, a colleague emailed an updated chart describing the investigative steps. In most of the cases, the bureau said it either could not find contact information for the caller or could not reach the alleged victim. One tipster, who called multiple times, was “deemed not credible.” The agents also included a criminal background on the tipsters and alleged victims, providing details on a handful of them.
For most of the tips that agents included in the table, The New York Times was able to locate formal F.B.I. files that shed more light on the allegations, and also provide additional details, including when the complaints were made. The bureau typically tracks tips with intake forms and witness interviews in documents known as 302s.
In December, Mr. Blanche pledged that the administration would not remove or withhold mentions of the president, declaring, “We are not redacting information around President Trump.”
But in at least two cases, The Times could not initially find any related records underpinning the tips.
One was a case where a caller reported an alleged sexual assault after visiting the “Trump Plaza” in 1987. The caller claimed that the victim apparently remembered seeing “a flash” of Mr. Trump’s face. The agents wrote that there was “no contact made” on the case; the victim was dead and the caller “did not have confirmed information.” They also noted that someone related to the tip — it is unclear whether it was the caller or the purported victim — had an extensive criminal history. No additional records related to the tip appear to be included in the trove.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Justice Department said that all responsive files related to the Epstein investigations had been published, adding that “salacious claims made by random, anonymous callers via phone tip” were common in 2019 and 2020.
The second case with missing underlying documents involved a woman who grew up in South Carolina. She told the F.B.I. in 2019, shortly after Mr. Epstein’s arrest, that as a teenager in the 1980s, she had been sexually assaulted, first by Mr. Epstein in her home state, and later by Mr. Trump on a trip to the New York area.
The summary referred to F.B.I. memos that were written after several separate interviews with the woman, but those memos were not released in late January when Justice Department officials said they had largely completed the document review. Pressed about the missing memos, officials said that they had been identified as “duplicative” and therefore withheld, and that the agency was reviewing whether they should be released.
Late Friday, the department released them, saying it had determined that the interview memos were not duplicative. It is unclear why officials ever considered them duplicative given the seemingly intensive process the department had established to review the documents.
Under a three-stage filtering process, low-level lawyers reviewed pages and proposed redactions, then higher-level officials would conduct a secondary review before a document would reach a third-level review by more senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“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 in a statement posted online.
In the interviews, the woman said she met Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump when she was a teenager living in South Carolina, and said they sexually assaulted her in separate incidents when she was 13 to 15 years old.
The F.B.I. memos describing her multiple interviews offer little in the way of specific, confirmable details about the incident. The memos say she was uncertain whether she was in New York or New Jersey, and remembered only that she was in a tall building with big rooms.
There is no known evidence previously indicating that Mr. Epstein spent time in South Carolina during the relevant time period, or that Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump were friends then.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called the woman’s account “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence.” She also noted that no charges were filed as a result of her claims, including during the Biden administration.
The bulk of the references to Mr. Trump in the F.B.I. files did not suggest wrongdoing, but did demonstrate his closeness to Mr. Epstein many years ago. For example, some people who spoke to the F.B.I. reported being introduced to Mr. Trump at social affairs, or recalled the two men being on the phone. Some described lewd statements they said they overheard Mr. Trump saying to Mr. Epstein. And some of Mr. Epstein’s employees recounted Mr. Trump visiting Mr. Epstein’s homes or being listed in his contact book.
One F.B.I. document said that shortly after news reports said Mr. Epstein was under investigation by the local police for abusing girls, the police chief in Palm Beach, Fla., Michael Reiter, received a call from Mr. Trump. Years later, the police chief told the F.B.I. what he remembered of the conversation.
“Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document recounting their conversation.
Mike Baker, Tawnell D. Hobbs and Urvashi Uberoy contributed reporting, and Julie Tate contributed research.
Steve Eder has been an investigative reporter for The Times for more than a decade.
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