DOJ Withheld Trump Assault Allegations and Over-Redacted the Epstein Files — Then a Federal Judge Ordered It to Unredact Them

Details

On March 5, 2026, the Department of Justice published three previously withheld FBI interview summaries — known as 302 reports — in which a woman alleged that President Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was a young teenager after being introduced to him by Jeffrey Epstein. The release came only after weeks of media investigation, a congressional probe into whether the documents were illegally withheld, and a bipartisan House Oversight Committee vote to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. No criminal charges have been filed. Trump has never been interviewed by authorities regarding the allegations.

The Allegations

According to the FBI 302 reports, the woman told investigators that when she was between 13 and 15 years old, Epstein took her to either New York or New Jersey, where "in a very tall building with huge rooms" he introduced her to Trump. She said Trump told others in the room to leave, then said something to the effect of "let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be." He then unzipped his pants and forced her head toward his penis, she told the FBI. She said she bit him, and in response he pulled her hair, punched her in the side of the head, and said "get this little bitch the hell out of here."

The woman said she had two additional interactions with Trump but asked to move on to another subject before providing details. In her final interview, when agents asked again about Trump — noting he was the "current U.S. president" — she asked "what the point would be of providing the information at this point in her life when there was a strong possibility nothing could be done about it."

The woman also described receiving threatening phone calls and being nearly run off the road by cars. When she said under her breath that if Epstein wasn't responsible, maybe it was "the other one," agents pressed her on who she meant. She replied: "Trump."

According to the Daily Beast, the woman also described nicknames that Trump and Epstein allegedly used for young women: "fresh meat," "untainted," and "not jaded." She told investigators their relationship "included a certain amount of jealousy" but that "at some point, they ended up on level playing fields." She also alleged that Epstein was blackmailing people and that Trump knew about it.

Separately, the DOJ itself released a presentation that includes a slide titled "PROMINENT NAMES" featuring 11 men accused of misconduct — with Trump listed first, alongside an accusation that he assaulted a minor.

The "Prominent Names" Slideshow

The presentation is a 21-page slide deck that FBI agents drafted after the Justice Department announced in July 2025 that it would not release additional Epstein records. It catalogued the DOJ's investigations into Epstein and Maxwell and summarized allegations against 11 prominent men — including, alongside Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, Leon Black, Les Wexner, Jes Staley, and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The Miami Herald noted the accusations were "based largely on uncorroborated tips and interviews." A July 24, 2025, email accompanying the list asked a colleague to "write me a sentence or two" summarizing "the salacious statements made against the individuals in the file." A version of the deck was sent to FBI Director Kash Patel on August 7, 2025 — a month before he told Congress in September that the FBI had "no credible information" that Epstein trafficked victims to anyone besides himself.

The "PROMINENT NAMES" page lists two separate allegations against Trump. The first is the assault described above: "[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to 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," with the incident placed between 1983 and 1985, when the victim would have been 13 to 15.

The second allegation appears directly below: "[REDACTED] remembered Epstein introduced her to Trump saying 'This is a good one, huh' and Trump responded 'Yes'," the slide reads, dating the exchange to roughly 1984, when that victim would have been 14. According to NPR, this second woman was a key prosecution witness in Ghislaine Maxwell's 2021 sex-trafficking trial. She told the FBI, across six interviews between September 2019 and September 2021, that Epstein and Maxwell's abuse began when she was around 13 and attending the Interlochen Center for the Arts, and that Epstein at one point took her to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump. Sollenberger noted that this account "carries immense credibility" inside the DOJ precisely because it came from a witness the government had already relied on to convict Maxwell. Files pertaining to this witness were also among those removed from public view.

Credibility and Limitations

The FBI 302 reports record what a witness told investigators but do not include corroborating information or agents' assessments. The allegations remain uncorroborated in the public record. The woman's statements allege the incident with Trump took place in the early-to-mid 1980s — a period when Epstein and Trump did not appear to be in contact, according to ABC News.

However, the FBI conducted four separate interviews with the woman between July and October 2019, suggesting the accusation met a threshold for sustained investigative attention. Independent journalist Roger Sollenberger noted that while "credible" does not mean verified — the woman did not memorialize the abuse in writing when it occurred — it does mean the FBI found her credible enough to continue interviewing her. Julie K. Brown of The Miami Herald, who has broken much of the Epstein story, reported that DOJ officials who spoke to the woman found her to be credible.

CNN identified a possible match between the accuser and a "Jane Doe 4" who filed a lawsuit against the Epstein estate with similar claims — abuse in South Carolina, being brought to gatherings in New York with "prominent, wealthy men" — though that lawsuit does not name Trump. That victim was "deemed ineligible to receive compensation" by the Epstein Victims' Compensation Program. An FBI email from 2025, included in the DOJ files, notes that "one identified victim claimed abuse by Trump but ultimately refused to cooperate."

It is unclear what became of the FBI's investigation into the woman's claims. The released files do not clarify how investigators assessed the allegations or whether any further steps were taken.

Newly released jail records add a further data point: according to a June 2026 New York Times investigation of Epstein's death (discussed below), while Epstein was jailed in 2019 his lawyers discussed a possible proffer with federal prosecutors, and Epstein — jotting on a legal pad — repeatedly tried to come up with information he might have on Trump, then serving his first term, to offer them. His notes ("Trump is a total con artist — smoke & mirrors," "Never had money") suggest he "could come up with little that wasn't already known." The notes cut both ways: they show Epstein believed Trump material was his most valuable potential currency with prosecutors, but also that he apparently had no undisclosed incriminating information to trade.

Why the Documents Were Initially Withheld

The FBI conducted four interviews with the woman, but only the first — in which she discussed Epstein but did not mention Trump — was included in the DOJ's January 2026 release of 3.5 million pages. The three interviews in which she accused Trump of assault were not published.

In February, independent journalists Roger Sollenberger and Nina Burleigh discovered records of the missing interviews in an archived copy of a DOJ database document — one that had been saved by the Wayback Machine before being taken offline. The Atlantic confirmed the pattern, and House Democrats told the outlet that their review of unredacted material available to Congress appeared to corroborate the reporting.

Oversight Democrats stated that "the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes."

The DOJ responded on social media that Democrats "should stop misleading the public while manufacturing outrage," insisting that "NOTHING has been deleted." After releasing the documents on March 5, the DOJ explained on X that it had reviewed allegations of missing 302s and discovered that three subsequent interviews with the accuser "were coded as 'duplicative'" — and that a broader review found 15 documents total were incorrectly coded. The statement did not explain why, beyond possible human error, the records were marked as duplicates.

NPR reported that even after the March 5 release, 37 pages of related records remain missing from the public database, including handwritten interview notes, a law enforcement report, and license records. The Wall Street Journal found that more than 40,000 documents were missing from the online file cache overall. Several of these still-withheld records — including the interview notes behind the FBI documents on the Trump allegations — later became the subject of Judge Sullivan's June 26 court order (see below).

Was the Withholding for Victim Protection?

The DOJ's stated policy for redactions across the Epstein file release was that they were "limited to the protection of victims and their families" and that "notable individuals and politicians were not redacted in the release of any files." However, several factors complicate the victim-protection explanation for withholding entire documents:

The Transparency Act specifically prohibits redactions made on the basis of "embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary." The law envisions that victim-identifying details can be redacted from documents while keeping the underlying records publicly available — not that entire documents be withheld.

The DOJ has faced sustained criticism for the opposite problem — failing to adequately protect victim identities while over-redacting names of powerful men. Lawyers for Epstein survivors told a federal court that nearly 100 victims had their lives "turned upside down" by the DOJ's failure to redact their identifying information. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) told CNN that the DOJ "has protected the Epstein class with blanket redactions in some areas while failing to protect the identities of survivors in other areas."

More broadly, the DOJ has withheld FBI 302 victim interview statements — the summaries where victims name their abusers — across the file release. Khanna and Massie, the bipartisan co-authors of the Transparency Act, have accused the DOJ of receiving already-redacted files from the FBI and simply uploading them, in violation of the law's requirements.

Congressional Response

On March 4, the House Oversight Committee voted 24–19 to subpoena Attorney General Bondi to testify about the DOJ's handling of the Epstein files. Five Republicans — Nancy Mace (SC), Tim Burchett (TN), Lauren Boebert (CO), Michael Cloud (TX), and Scott Perry (PA) — joined all Democrats in support.

Rep. Mace, who introduced the motion, wrote on X: "AG Bondi claims the DOJ has released all of the Epstein files. The record is clear: they have not. The Epstein case is one of the greatest cover-ups in American history. Videos are missing. Audio is missing. Logs are missing."

According to The Atlantic, when AG Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee in February, Epstein survivors seated behind her were asked to raise their hands if they had reached out to the DOJ to offer testimony and evidence — every hand went up. When asked how many had been ignored or denied, every hand went up again. Bondi never turned around.

Bondi's Testimony and the Perjury Accusation

At that same February 11, 2026, House Judiciary Committee hearing — her first appearance before the panel since taking office — Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) played decades-old video of Trump at a party with Epstein and pressed Bondi on whether underage girls were present at any Epstein gathering Trump attended, and whether the DOJ had evidence tying Trump to Epstein's crimes. Bondi dismissed the questioning as politically motivated: "This is so ridiculous. They are trying to deflect from all the great things Donald Trump has done. There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime."

Lieu responded, "I believe you just lied under oath," and moved to display "another document from a witness who called the FBI's National Threat Operations Center." According to Lieu, the tip came from a limousine driver who said he had driven Trump and overheard a phone call between Trump and Epstein. The driver also said he had met a girl who told him she was raped by Trump and Epstein, and who was later found dead in what officers on the scene reportedly doubted was a suicide. Lieu said no one at the DOJ had interviewed the witness and demanded they do so. Bondi shot back: "Don't you ever accuse me of committing a crime."

On February 23, Lieu and Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) — both former prosecutors on the Judiciary Committee — sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche calling for a special counsel to investigate Bondi for perjury during the February 11 hearing. They argued that "a number of the documents from the Epstein files released to date by the Department of Justice directly contradict her statement" that there was no evidence Trump committed a crime, and that "when confronted with her lie, she did not retract her statement, she doubled down." The letter pointed to the 21-page "prominent names" slideshow and cited Bondi's acknowledgment that the DOJ had monitored which files members of Congress were reviewing — evidence, the lawmakers argued, that "she would have seen the documents that incriminated Trump." The DOJ has characterized the accusations as politically motivated and maintained the underlying tips have "zero credibility."

White House Response

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the allegations "completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence, from a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history." She added that "Joe Biden's department of justice knew about them for four years and did nothing with them — because they knew President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong. As we have said countless times, President Trump has been totally exonerated by the release of the Epstein Files."

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told The Atlantic: "By releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee's subpoena request, and President Trump recently calling for further investigations into Epstein's Democrat friends, the Trump Administration has done more for the victims than Democrats ever have."

A Court Orders DOJ to Unredact the Files (June–July 2026)

The concealment dispute moved from Congress into federal court in the spring of 2026. In April, independent journalist and legal commentator Katie Phang sued the Justice Department, arguing that its redactions were a "brazen, shocking, and ongoing violation" of the federal law mandating the release of the Epstein files. She asked the court to order the release of several unredacted documents. The scale of the dispute is substantial: the government has collected roughly six million pages of Epstein-related material, of which only about half has been released since disclosures began in December 2025 under the Transparency Act's mandate.

On June 26, 2026 — hours after the DOJ blew through a 1 p.m. response deadline that same day — U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to either release unredacted versions of the disputed files or explain why it could not, giving the government until July 2 to comply. The documents in question, according to CBS News, include eight emails with either the sender or recipient blacked out, a draft indictment of Epstein with the names of potential co-conspirators obscured, and a 2019 email that mentions several co-conspirators whose names were redacted. Critically for this article, Sullivan also ordered the DOJ to either release the interview notes behind the FBI documents summarizing the unverified allegations against Trump — dozens of pages from the FBI's 2019 interviews with the South Carolina woman described above, the same withheld records at the center of the March controversy — or explain why it couldn't. He further ordered the department to release a log listing every redaction it has made, as required by the Transparency Act.

One of the emails covered by the order is the message in which Epstein refers to a "torture video," whose redacted recipient drew scrutiny from Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY). Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche later suggested on social media the recipient was Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, former CEO of the Dubai-based logistics firm DP World.

In a 48-page opinion, Sullivan concluded that Phang had standing to sue and was likely to prevail on the merits, writing that Blanche "conceded Ms. Phang's merits arguments" by not responding substantively, and that a Freedom of Information Act request — the DOJ's proposed alternative — "does not provide an adequate remedy." The department had argued that Phang could not sue to force disclosure and should instead file a FOIA request; Phang's lawyers pointed to prior denials of Epstein-related FOIA requests. Sullivan denied the DOJ's request to pause any order for seven days to weigh an appeal.

Phang's attorney, Brendan Ballou, told CBS News: "The government thought that it could ignore its own law and blow off a judge's order, all for the sake of protecting the very powerful and the very rich. It didn't work, and now the public will finally get transparency around Jeffrey Epstein and his network." A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency would appeal — declaring that "DOJ has produced all responsive documents and will appeal this decision with confidence" — insisting Blanche "has not conceded anything" and that Sullivan's "perverse interpretation appears to be focused on driving misleading headlines." The spokesperson argued the ruling would require the DOJ to "violate the law by un-redacting victim names, who as the Department has always explained, sadly became co-conspirators."

The DOJ did not comply by the July 2 deadline. Instead, in a filing signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Blanche, the department defended every redaction, argued it had "adequately complied" after reviewing more than six million documents, and asked Sullivan to grant 60 days for the Office of the Solicitor General to decide whether to formally appeal. Blanche separately offered to brief the judge privately on the sealed materials. The department said some redactions were effectively irreversible because the originals of certain FBI handwritten notes could not be located. As of mid-July, Sullivan had not ruled on the extension request, and the disputed emails, the draft indictment, and the interview notes on the Trump allegations remained blacked out.

New Mexico Accuses the DOJ of Obstructing Its Zorro Ranch Investigation (July 2026)

The withholding allegations spread beyond Washington in July 2026, when a state attorney general formally accused the department of obstructing a criminal investigation. On July 9, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez released a letter — sent to Acting Attorney General Blanche on June 30 — accusing the Justice Department of impeding the state's criminal investigation into Epstein's activities at Zorro Ranch, the roughly 10,000-acre estate near Stanley, New Mexico, where survivors say they were trafficked and abused, by withholding unredacted records.

Torrez reopened the state's criminal investigation in February 2026 after documents unsealed in the Epstein file release indicated that federal investigators had largely overlooked the ranch when they took over a state-level inquiry in 2019 — New Mexico's earlier probe had been closed at the request of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. The disclosure that Zorro Ranch went largely unexamined prompted state lawmakers to establish a bipartisan "truth commission" with subpoena power, and Torrez's office searched the ranch in March — now owned by Dallas real estate magnate Don Huffines, the recently appointed Texas comptroller, who says he is cooperating. New Mexico's interest is not merely historical: Epstein's conduct in the state was never charged, and state law has no statute of limitations for certain sex crimes.

According to the New York Times, Torrez first requested the original, unredacted federal records — which he said contain names of survivors, witnesses, and co-conspirators who could aid a state prosecution — in February, and reiterated the request five times through multiple channels without receiving the documents, despite DOJ officials assuring him months earlier that they intended to send them. More than 130 days had elapsed since the initial request, "an unreasonable delay under any rule of reason," Torrez wrote. "The U.S.D.O.J.'s continued withholding of unredacted records is causing real and escalating harm... Every day that the U.S.D.O.J. withholds these records, the foundation upon which a New Mexico prosecution could be built erodes." He added: "Every avenue of investigation that begins with a redacted name, a blacked-out face or an obscured date is an avenue that ends before it begins." Torrez set an end-of-July deadline, after which he will treat the request as denied.

A DOJ spokeswoman, Kiersten Pels, responded that the agency "welcomes New Mexico undertaking additional investigation of the Zorro Ranch and stands ready to provide necessary assistance," and the department has said it substantively responded to the state last month. Torrez said he had received no response to the letter itself. The standoff — also covered by CNN, Reuters, and Al Jazeera — means the department stands accused of withholding Epstein records not only from journalists and the public but from a state law enforcement agency pursuing a live criminal investigation.

What the Released Files Revealed About Epstein's Death

While the administration fought disclosure in court, the documents already released under the Transparency Act enabled the most thorough independent examination yet of the question that has fueled much of the public's suspicion: how Epstein died. In June 2026, The New York Times published a major investigative reconstruction of Epstein's 35 days in the Metropolitan Correctional Center (mirrored here), drawing on the more than three million pages of documents, photos, and videos released under the Act, interviews with more than 40 inmates, jail employees, lawyers, and officials — many never before questioned by reporters or investigators — and a successful court petition to unseal a previously hidden document.

The investigation substantially bolstered the official conclusion — reached by both federal investigators and the DOJ inspector general — that Epstein died by suicide on August 10, 2019. Its central discovery was an apparent suicide note Epstein wrote before an earlier apparent attempt around July 22–23, 2019: "It is a treat to be able to choose one's time to say goodbye," he wrote, fuming that investigators "Found NOTHING!!!" His then-cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, found the note and gave it to his own lawyers rather than jail officials — it stayed sealed in Tartaglione's court filings, hidden from investigators and the public for years, until the Times' lawyers won its unsealing in May 2026. (The Times had separately sued over the alleged suicide note.) Tartaglione also said he twice caught Epstein preparing nooses and reported it to guards who laughed him off; a later cellmate, Efrain Reyes, described flushing a makeshift line down the toilet after finding Epstein fidgeting with it at night. Epstein's other jail notes recorded his despair — "ONLY PAIN TO ME & Others in the future. NOT very much fun!" — and, as noted above, his failed attempts to dredge up information on Trump to offer prosecutors.

The reconstruction also documented the cascade of institutional failures that made the death possible: guards Tova Noel and Michael Thomas (later indicted for falsifying records) skipped required rounds for hours and were seen motionless at their desk; only two of roughly eleven security cameras were recording due to a hardware failure; Epstein was left alone in his cell despite an explicit order that he always have a cellmate, after Reyes was transferred out on August 9 and no one resolved the gap; and the cell was strewn with contraband linens and multiple nooses. The investigation addressed the genuine loose ends — an unexplained orange blur on camera footage at 10:40 p.m. (which the inspector general concluded was most likely Noel carrying linens), the collection of the wrong noose as evidence, and a forensic dispute in which pathologist Michael Baden, hired by Epstein's brother, argued three neck fractures pointed "towards homicide," while consulted pathologists said such fractures also occur in suicides. Investigators concluded that murdering Epstein "would have required a massive conspiracy" spanning multiple jail operations.

The findings bear on this controversy in two ways. First, they undercut the murder conspiracy theories that senior administration figures — including Bondi, Patel, and Trump himself — had at various points amplified before taking office and then retreated from. Second, they demonstrate what disclosure actually accomplishes: the investigation was possible only because Congress forced the files' release over the administration's resistance, and it answered — rather than inflamed — the public's questions.

Broader Context

Trump's prior civil liability for sexual abuse: In May 2023, a federal jury in New York found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and awarded her $5 million in damages. Carroll also won an $83.3 million defamation judgment in 2024. The jury's finding established a legal determination — though in a civil proceeding with a lower burden of proof than a criminal case — that Trump had committed sexual abuse.

Trump's private opposition to the file release: According to The Atlantic, Trump privately attempted to persuade Republican lawmakers to vote against the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has said the president argued that "his friends would get hurt" by the release. Four administration officials told The Atlantic that Trump has repeatedly told aides he wants the Epstein matter to "go away," and one described him as "seething." The White House launched what Rep. Massie called a "360-pressure campaign" against the bill, including offering Massie's key staff members more lucrative jobs to weaken his legislative capacity.

Inside the White House's Epstein crisis: "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," the June 2026 book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan based on roughly 1,000 interviews (including with Trump himself), reports that the Epstein files controversy so alarmed the administration that senior staff convened an emergency Situation Room meeting on the crisis without Trump. Vice President JD Vance advocated releasing the documents, but Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said Trump would reject that approach. Per a New Yorker review and secondary coverage of the book, the authors report that Bondi and Blanche blocked release of the files and that the controversy became the first major point of opposition to Trump from his own MAGA base. The book relies heavily on deep-background sourcing, a limitation reviewers have noted; the White House dismissed it, and Trump called it "Fake News."

Trump's shifting position on Epstein file release: During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump publicly stated that the Epstein files "should be released." After taking office, the DOJ announced in July 2025 that it would not share any more records. Only after Congress passed the Transparency Act — with just one House member voting against it and the Senate voting unanimously — did the DOJ begin releasing documents.

Contradictions in Trump's account: Among the unredacted files provided to Congress is an email from one of Epstein's attorneys recounting a 2009 conversation in which Trump reportedly claimed that Epstein had never been asked to leave Mar-a-Lago. This contradicts the White House's longstanding claim that Trump barred Epstein from the club "for being a creep." Separately, a former Palm Beach police chief told the FBI that Trump called him in 2006, after learning Epstein was under investigation, saying "Thank goodness you're stopping him, everyone has known he's been doing this."

Administration ties to Epstein: At least six Cabinet members or senior administration officials were in contact with Epstein and had closer and longer relationships with him than previously known. All have denied wrongdoing. It is unclear whether these relationships were raised during vetting or background checks.

Pattern of Epstein-related allegations: Trump's longstanding social relationship with Epstein has been widely documented. In a 2002 New York Magazine profile, Trump described Epstein as a "terrific guy" who "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." A New York Times review of the DOJ's release found Trump mentioned more than 38,000 times — across more than 5,300 files — though the outlet cautioned that many of those references are news clippings, emails, and unverified tips rather than evidence of criminal conduct, reflecting Epstein's habit of hoarding media coverage of Trump.

Documented remarks about young women and girls: Multiple recorded statements by Trump on The Howard Stern Show have resurfaced alongside the Epstein file disclosures. In a 2006 appearance, when co-host Robin Quivers asked the then-60-year-old Trump whether he had an "age limit" for dating women, he hesitated and responded: "No, no, I have no age... I mean, I have an age... I don't want to be like Congressman Foley, with, you know, 12-year-olds" — a reference to Representative Mark Foley, who had recently resigned over sexually explicit messages to teenage congressional pages. Fact-checkers note that Trump was invoking Foley as a negative example rather than stating a personal preference, though the exchange took place the same year Epstein faced his first criminal investigation for sexual offenses involving minors. In a 2003 Stern appearance, Trump called Paris Hilton "beautiful" and recalled that "the first time I saw her, she walked into a room and I said, 'Who the hell is that?'" — before noting he had known her since she was 12 years old. When Stern asked if he wanted to pursue her, Trump replied, "Well, at 12, I wasn't interested." In 1992 footage from a Mar-a-Lago event, Trump told two teenage girls in a choir, "Just think, in a couple of years, I'll be dating you." None of these remarks independently prove criminal conduct, but they have contributed to public scrutiny surrounding the Epstein file revelations.

Trump has not been accused by law enforcement of wrongdoing related to Epstein. He has never been interviewed by authorities about the matter.