The Epstein Accusation Just Got Harder to Dismiss

A functioning democracy requires that no one is above accountability, not even the most powerful person in the country.

Charleston, SC’s The Post and Courier, one of America’s oldest newspapers, published an investigation Sunday corroborating key details in the account of a woman who told the FBI that Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13. The FBI interviewed her four separate times. A DOJ source told the Miami Herald the agency would not have done that if it found her not credible. She accused Trump of assaulting her in the mid-1980s, pulling her hair and striking her in the head.

The outlet verified that her mother rented a home to Epstein in South Carolina, confirmed details about another man she accused of assault, and found that her mother was charged with stealing $22,000 from her employer, which the woman told investigators was connected to Epstein’s blackmail scheme. Trump has not been charged with any crime. The House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi over the handling of the files. Thirty-seven pages remain missing from the public database. The DOJ initially withheld these files entirely from the database the Epstein Files Transparency Act required them to populate. Trump signed that law. The war is ensuring this story gets a fraction of the attention it deserves. We are not going to let it disappear.

A functioning democracy requires that no one is above accountability, not even the most powerful person in the country. When the Department of Justice withholds files from a transparency law that the president himself signed, that’s not a bureaucratic mistake. That’s a cover-up in plain sight. And the fact that a war is drowning out this story doesn’t make it less true. It makes staying on it more important.