Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) openly accused Attorney General Todd Blanche of illegal conduct Saturday on the heels of a new report that an alleged trove of “missing” handwritten FBI notes related to Jeffrey Epstein had been sitting online for months, fully unredacted, and accessible to anyone.
The supposed notes stem from a 2019 FBI interview with a South Carolina woman who accused President Donald Trump and Epstein of sexually and physically abusing her starting when she was 13 years old. Referred to as “Jane Doe 4,” the woman was interviewed by the FBI four times and was found credible by the agency, a Justice Department source told the Miami Herald.
Trump is not facing any criminal charges and has repeatedly denied any and all wrongdoing as it relates to his conduct with Epstein.
The Justice Department (DOJ) has not released the sought-after handwritten FBI notes, which are among the Epstein-related files being sought by former MSNBC host and attorney Katie Phang with her ongoing lawsuit. The agency has justified withholding Epstein-related files by describing them as “duplicative” of material already released.
On Saturday, however, data researcher and writer Rye Howard-Stone released a new report regarding nearly two dozen of the FBI notes – which he claimed had been uploaded by journalist Kaelan Deese of the conservative Washington Examiner. The notes themselves also revealed, according to Phang, that they were not, in fact, “duplicative” of any documents released thus far.
Lieu took to X to publicly call out Blanche.
“Dear [Blanche]: Please tell us the exception under the Epstein Files Transparency Act that allowed you to withhold the below FBI interview notes from the American people,” Lieu wrote Saturday in a social media post on X, tagging Blanche’s account on X and resharing commentary related to the discovery of the FBI notes.
“You can’t, because you are an unethical lawyer and illegally withheld those notes. November is coming.”
The Daily Beast’s Roger Stollenberger called the entire ordeal “inexcusable,” and said he’d “never seen something like this.”
Dear @AGToddBlanche: Please tell us the exception under the Epstein Files Transparency Act that allowed you to withhold the below FBI interview notes from the American people.
You can’t, because you are an unethical lawyer and illegally withheld those notes.
November is coming. https://t.co/ioe5m1xhOQ
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) August 22, 2026