The Miami Herald’s investigative team, led by Julie K. Brown, is doing some remarkable reporting on “How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime.”
This is the very disturbing story of Jeffrey Epstein, the gazillionaire hedge-fund rent-skimmer who used his fortune to indulge his life-long passion for sex with underage girls. Epstein did this for years, creating an abuse-and-recruiting system that provided him with a steady stream of victims who number in the dozens. He is a sexual predator of the same vile caliber as Larry Nassar or Jerry Sandusky.
But while Nassar and Sandusky will spend the rest of their lives in prison, Epstein served only a 13-month sentence, throughout which he enjoyed lenient work-release privileges. The FBI investigation into the likelihood that Epstein’s crimes included countless more victims, as well as trafficking children from overseas, was abruptly ended, his victims were not invited to testify at his sentencing, and extraordinary measures were taken to keep the details of his crimes from being known by the public.
A deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved.
Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.
The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.
As part of the arrangement, Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it.
Brown’s report, as the headline says, tells how this happened, but the explanation of why this happened remains uncertain.
The how involves Alexander Acosta, the U.S. Attorney appointed by George W. Bush for the southern district of Florida. He’s the guy who cut this weird sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein. Or, rather, he’s the guy who allowed Epstein’s team of top-dollar attorneys to write the most extraordinarily lenient deal imaginable, and who then signed on the dotted line, giving them and their client everything they asked for and more.
This was a very odd thing for a politically ambitious prosecutor to do. Epstein was just the kind of monstrous and utterly unsympathetic predator that politically ambitious prosecutors love to “throw the book at.” Acosta had mountains of evidence assembled by police and FBI investigators, and their investigation was still going — pointing toward even more evidence of even larger crimes. It was just the sort of thing that a grandstanding U.S. Attorney could turn into a winning campaign for governor or senator.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, Acosta abruptly agreed to shut down the ongoing investigations, to hush up any publicity surrounding the case, and to ensure that Epstein served less time and lighter time than someone might get for a first-time marijuana offense.
Why?
Well, one answer might be money. Epstein has loads of it. He’s used his fortune to make powerful political allies, and to hire that legal dream team — one which includes cable news favorite Alan Dershowitz and the infamous Kenneth Starr (a man oxymoronically notorious for being both a stern prude and a rape apologist). Epstein’s incalculable wealth is certainly vast enough that his sweetheart deal might just be a matter of garden-variety corruption — of bought-and-paid-for political favors and the second set of rules that dark money donations buy for the overclass.
But this looks to be even worse than that. Part of the investigation that Acosta’s bargain ended was looking into the possibility that some of Epstein’s overclass “friends” participated in his sexual use and abuse of underage girls. And that raises the suspicion that this was the reason for such an unusual deal.
Epstein is a grotesquely wealthy man who, like most such wealthy men, spent a fortune seeking to buy political influence in the hopes of keeping his wealth and collecting even more of it. For years, he’s spent a great deal of money trying to curry favor with all manner of politicians, lobbyists, and his fellow billionaires. In another article in this series, Brown writes:
Jeffrey Epstein had a little black book filled with the names and personal phone numbers of some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential people, from Bill Clinton and Donald Trump to actors, actresses, scientists and business tycoons.
A money manager for the super-rich, Epstein had two private jets, the largest single residence in Manhattan, an island in the Caribbean, a ranch in New Mexico and a waterfront estate in Florida.
Most of the people named in Epstein’s address book probably enjoyed his lavish entertaining and hospitality without ever knowing about his life as a sexual criminal. But some probably knew, or suspected, and said nothing. Others, investigators believed, knew and participated.
Might some of those “friends” have leaned on Acosta to produce Epstein’s sweetheart deal? We don’t know. If it was done as a cover-up for any of those friends, then the cover-up was a successful one. But any such “friends” and co-conspirators with Epstein would certainly have had every incentive to persuade Acosta to make exactly this kind of sweep-it-under-the-rug arrangement — whether because they sought to cover their own misdeeds or because Epstein thus had the goods on them and would easily have been able to blackmail them into intervening on his behalf. But we don’t know.
We do know that Alexander Acosta took care of the Jeffrey Epstein situation and that a few years later one of Jeffrey Epstein’s friends awarded him a huge, surprising promotion to the cabinet-level post of secretary of labor. That walks like and quacks like a quid pro quo.
The question in the title of this post is a phrase sometimes used to assert an opinion. “Why isn’t so-and-so in prison?” we ask, meaning by that, “I think so-and-so deserves to be in prison.” But that question isn’t merely opinion here. Jeffrey Epstein was found guilty of crimes that the law and courts have almost always found ought to result in prison. His crimes merit that. The facts of his case mean that he should still be in prison — real prison, not the cozy work-release in a luxury office, attended by his own hired security “prison” in which he briefly served time.
So the question in the title of this post is a genuine question. And it is a question with a specific answer. We do not yet know that answer, but it exists. There is a reason that Jeffrey Epstein is not in prison, as he should be. There is a reason that Alexander Acosta bent over backwards to go easy on Epstein, to end the criminal investigation, and to keep his scandal out of the public eye.
We need to know those reasons. We need to know the answer to this question.
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