One Cabinet member after another has been forced to leave the Trump administration over corruption and other issues, leaving Trump’s Cabinet at its most unstable since he’s assumed office two years ago. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Justice and the Interior are all being headed by acting officials.
We turn now to look at whether Trump’s labor secretary, Alex Acosta, will be the next Trump Cabinet member to go. As U.S. prosecutor in Florida, Acosta cut what’s been described as “one of the most lenient deals for a serial child sex offender in history.” Multimillionaire hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein, friend to Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and others, has been accused of molesting and trafficking hundreds of underage girls in Florida, but served just 13 months in a Florida county jail. Fifteen congressmembers have called for a probe into Trump’s labor secretary.
The Miami Herald recently published a series of articles exposing Epstein’s crimes and the high-powered people who protected him. In the wake of the investigation, Epstein settled a defamation lawsuit against the lawyer of some of his accusers, avoiding testimonies from survivors who were expected to take the stand. A separate case to overturn the original 2008 plea deal is still pending.
Jeffrey Epstein talking:
I had covered a number of stories about the Florida prison system, and I had—I knew that sex trafficking was a big problem here in Florida. And every time, quite frankly, I started to do a story about sex trafficking and do some homework on it, Mr. Epstein’s name kept coming up. And the more that I read about it, the more I thought, you know, this is something that I don’t understand—I’m sure a lot of people don’t understand—how, in a state that has a high rate of sex trafficking—how does someone who has trafficked all these girls—these were young high school, middle school girls—over quite a long period of time, how does someone like that get away with it, when, at the time that this happened, Alex Acosta, who was the U.S. attorney in Miami, was going headstrong into prosecuting people who were purveyors of child pornography, sending them to prison for decades? And here is a man who had trafficked a number—some estimates are as many as hundreds—of girls, and he gets away with just serving a 13-month jail term, really, in a very cozy area of the county jail, where he was allowed to leave, most of the day, on work release.
the way that he obtained his money has always been a mystery. It’s almost as though no one has ever examined how he got his money. It’s surprising that the federal authorities didn’t look into that, because he seemed to have just a never-ending cash flow. He was able to hire some of the biggest and most costly lawyers in America to defend him.
He was, but he never graduated from college. Very, very smart. He was into physics and mathematics and biology. And he worked for Bear Stearns. And then he managed to ingratiate himself with some very wealthy, powerful people and managed their money. And as a result of managing a lot of famous people and wealthy people’s money, he himself made a lot of money. And as I said, it’s really a mystery exactly how much money he has and where it came from, but he has, it seems, like a never-ending source of cash. And he was able to really hire the best defense that his money could buy.
– Alex Acosta’s role, the current labor secretary. You know, to be clear, Donald Trump, quoted in New York Magazine in 2002, said, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it, Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” His plane, referred to by the press as the “Lolita Express,” President Clinton took it many times, his flights.
Alex Acosta was a Republican who was nominated in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush. He was also, at one point, in the administration, in the Bush administration, as the second in charge of the Department of Civil Rights in the Justice Department. And from there, he was nominated to become U.S. attorney in Miami.
And so, at the time that this case popped up in West Palm Beach, you know, Epstein was very much affiliated with Democratic causes. He was friends with the Clintons. He had donated money to Governor Richardson in New Mexico, where he also owns a property. He had a lot of important friends on both sides of the political aisle, but, that said, he knew at the time that since it was a Republican administration and Acosta was a Republican, that it was very important that—you know, Epstein realized it was very important for him to hire lawyers that had Republican connections.
And that’s what he did. He hired Jay Lefkowitz and Kenneth Starr, who were both with the well-known law firm Kirkland & Ellis, and who Acosta knew from his days working for that same law firm. So, they all had rubbed shoulders in the same kind of legal circles as well as political circles. So, Epstein was pretty shrewd in who he hired as lawyers, even though he was more aligned with Democrats. He knew that what he needed to do was hire Republicans. And that’s essentially what he did. He hired people who knew Acosta and who Acosta looked up to. You know, Kenneth Starr, of course, was someone that Acosta would have looked up to.
And so, I think it made it very hard for Alex Acosta to feel like he was going to go up against all these people. He was ambitious, and he wanted to go further in his political career. And there’s a school of thought out there that he acquiesced to a lot of these lawyers’ demands because he knew that if he went against these lawyers, it probably would have hurt his political career.
Jeffrey Epstein served his 13 months quite a number of years ago, and, you know, he was released in 2008. And he has basically just gone on to live his jet-setting life. there are civil lawsuits. he isn’t affiliated with them. The two most recent ones were settled as soon as my story ran. There is one that he’s not a party to, that several of the girls are suing the U.S. government, hoping to overturn that plea agreement.
– multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who for years orchestrated a sex trafficking network of hundreds of underage girls, accused of regularly molesting children as young as 13 at his Florida mansion. But the serial sex offender received a shockingly lenient sentence for his crimes: 13 months in county jail, with many of the days spent at his Palm Beach office with regular visitors. His driver would take him from the jail to work each day, and then he would go back to the jail to sleep.
– This was all due to a plea deal approved by Trump’s secretary of labor, Alexander Acosta, who was then U.S. attorney in Miami. The plea deal allowed Epstein to avoid a federal trial and possible life in prison, and effectively ended an FBI probe into the case.
– how the original case that was brought by Alex Acosta subverted any federal investigation
this happened around—he was first—Epstein was first investigated by police in 2005. The state attorney in Palm Beach reviewed the case in 2006, decided he didn’t want to fully prosecute Epstein. So the police chief in Palm Beach, who was very disturbed by the fact that it seemed like Epstein was going to almost get off, decided to refer this to the feds, to the FBI and to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Alex Acosta came into the picture in 2007, overseeing the case. And from the get-go, he was pretty hands-on, because the lawyers that Epstein hired were from the law firm that he had worked for previously, Kirkland & Ellis. These were very high-profile lawyers. And they put a lot of pressure to bear on him to work out some kind of a plea agreement, even though at the same time the plea negotiations were going on, the FBI was uncovering more and more evidence that Epstein’s crimes went far beyond Palm Beach, that he possibly was operating an international sex trafficking organization, in which he had recruiters overseas. And so, there were two parallel things going on: the FBI working the case at the same time that Alex Acosta and his team were trying to make the case go away, so to speak, by negotiating some kind of a plea bargain.
Essentially, what happened was, by making this deal, it basically ended the federal investigation. Epstein’s lawyers were very adept at keeping a lid on this, so the worst evidence, the worst of what he had—what Epstein had done with these girls, was really kept very quiet until well after Epstein was in jail. And it was too late for these victims to object to any kind of a plea deal, because they weren’t kept in the loop at all. They were never told that this is what the U.S. Attorney’s Office was doing. They were assured, throughout this time period, that the FBI was dutifully investigating and that they intended to prosecute him.
he was sentenced to 18 months, but he only served 13. And it was—yes, it was in a private wing, actually, of the Palm Beach County jail. He had a very friendly relationship with the Palm Beach County sheriff. You know, he lived in Palm Beach. He hired some of the sheriff’s deputies for private details. So he knew—he made it a point of knowing the sheriff, and the sheriff approved this cushy work release that he was able to get, where he really didn’t spend any more time in jail other than to basically sleep there.
at the time before the deal was actually, you know, executed, there was an ongoing FBI investigation that was uncovering new evidence and new victims all the time. I mean, recent files that I obtained over the past few months showed that the FBI agents were, you know, being flown to New York and New Mexico and other places to interview possible victims and other witnesses. But as a part of this deal that they eventually agreed to, this non-prosecution agreement, the FBI investigation ceased.
And what is also even more unusual, part of the wording in this non-prosecution agreement gave immunity not only to Epstein for federal—any federal prosecution, but to all his named and unnamed co-conspirators. In other words, anybody—and there were many people who helped him. You know, he had schedulers. He had recruiters. He had people, if they weren’t participating in the criminal activity, they helped enable his criminal activity. All those people, some of whom we don’t even know who they are, were given immunity from federal prosecution. And it’s a very unusual document. It’s a very unusual non-prosecution agreement, from what I understand.
ultimately, he simply pled guilty to two felony prostitution charges in state court. That’s what he served the 13 months for.
the main lawsuit that was scheduled to—actually, it was a trial that was scheduled to begin in Palm Beach County in December, involved Jeffrey Epstein and one of the lawyers that has represented the victims. Epstein—one of the most egregious things about this whole story, in my view, was the way that Epstein and the people he hired, his lawyers, the private investigators he hired, were able to bully everyone associated with this case who stood up for the girls. He went after the police chief. He went after the lead detective. You know, investigators followed these girls. They put their high beams on their houses. They ran some of their family members off the road. They just—it was a scorched-earth effort to intimidate anyone that would have tried to hold Epstein accountable.
And one of the people that Epstein went after was Brad Edwards, who was really the only—early on, the only person who stood up for these victims and was willing to do so pro bono, bringing this federal case against the U.S. government on behalf of the victims. And what Epstein basically did was he went after Edwards, and Edwards sued him for defamation because of some of the allegations, that are pretty complicated to get into. But he basically tried to ruin his reputation by accusing him of something that he didn’t do. Edwards sued him for defamation. The case also went on for years and years, because Epstein had the money, the financial resources, to just keep this case going.
And after my story ran and, you know, it received a lot of attention, Epstein realized that—you know, that he wasn’t going to be able to keep this case going. The trial was going to produce a lot of women who had been abused by him. And so he settled it. And in settling it, he issued a statement, essentially admitting that that’s exactly what he had been doing, that he had bullied the lawyer, Brad Edwards, because he wanted to try to intimidate him into—to not pursuing his cases on behalf of the victims.
The lawyer with—it was Brad Edwards. The lawyer representing the victims is Brad Edwards, a Fort Lauderdale attorney, who brought the Crime Victims’ Rights Act lawsuit, which is still ongoing. That lawsuit seeks to overturn this whole plea agreement. If the federal judge agrees with Edwards and the victims, it would be a precedent-setting case, because this has never been done before, where you have a plea agreement that not only has been signed, you know, and done with, but Epstein has already served his jail term, years ago. So, it would be really a precedent to set to overturn a plea agreement like this that is already signed and done.
Virginia Roberts worked, ironically, at Mar-a-Lago when she was 16, 17 years old, in the spa at Mar-a-Lago. And Epstein has an associate named Ghislaine Maxwell, who had been going from spa to spa, essentially, to try to get young girls, hire them as masseuses for Jeffrey Epstein. And so, she met her, Virginia, at—Ghislaine met Virginia at Mar-a-Lago, which is essentially, basically, around the corner from Epstein’s home in Palm Beach—they’re only a stone’s throw from each other—and convinced her to come to Jeffrey’s home, telling her that, you know, he wanted to hire a masseuse. She, at the time, was studying to become a masseuse. She was thinking about doing it as a career. And when she went—she claims, when she was brought to the house, she was groomed, from the very beginning, to do these sexually charged massages, which led into intercourse.
She had come from a very troubled past. She had already been sex-trafficked by another sex trafficker. She had been homeless in Miami when she was, you know, 15, 16 years old, and had fallen prey to a sex trafficker in Miami. So, in some respects, I think she felt that she was safe. Here, she was with this woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, who had promised her that they were sort of going to take care of her. And she got sucked into this whole, you know, sex trafficking arrangement where—she claims, anyway, that Epstein and Maxwell essentially pimped her out to other powerful people. She suspects that it was because he wanted—Epstein wanted to have some kind of leverage over some of these powerful people that she was asked to have sex with.
– according to your reporting, Julie, in 2016, a lawsuit is filed in Manhattan by a woman who once used the name Katie Johnson, claiming she was raped by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump at a party at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 1994, when she was 13 years old. Trump and Epstein both categorically deny it ever happened.
the case is really a mystery. She’s never gone public. I mean, she filed the lawsuit. That’s an assumed name. Katie Johnson is not her real name. I spoke with her lawyers as I was doing this investigation. Her lawyers firmly believed these allegations, or they wouldn’t have filed the lawsuit. However, just, you know, a few days before the 2016 election, she just decided that she wasn’t going to go through with it. And she essentially disappeared. Nobody really knows. She’s claimed that she had been threatened and she felt fearful for her life, and she disappeared. But no one really has been able to find her. And, you know, there’s been no real proof of her allegations. There really hasn’t, other than her word that this happened.
It did follow, you know, the same kind of trajectory that Epstein’s other crimes did, in that she claims she was recruited at Port Authority in New York. When she came there, she wanted to be a model. Someone approached her, said, “I know someone with modeling connections.” You know, Epstein was affiliated with Leslie Wexner, who owned The Limited and Victoria’s Secret. Epstein often used that, to dangle that in front of some of these girls, to say, “I can make you a model. I can make you famous. I can get you a job with Victoria’s Secret.” Those kinds of things. So, she claims she was told those same kind of things, which fits in with what we know happened with some of these other girls. But other than that, there has been really no evidence that has come—that her story is true at all.
– Federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act
Congress passed the Crime Victims’ Rights Act in order to give crime victims a say in their cases. In other words, Congress recognized that there was a time that the prosecutors, police and other people would just, you know, investigate these cases and leave them completely out of the picture, not allow them to participate in the process. And because this had happened so often, Congress passed this law that enumerated certain rights that crime victims have. Among them, they have the right to confer with prosecutors to find out how’s the case going. Prosecutors can’t ignore their phone calls or their letters. They have to say, “Here’s the status of the case,” or they have to respond in some way.
There’s a number of other rights that are listed in the act, but one of the key ones pertaining to this case is the one where they are to be notified of any impending plea deal. In this particular case, these plea negotiations were ongoing for a very long time. They were—you know, he had a number of times where they signed on a dotted line with this plea deal, so they were official documents saying that there was a plea deal. And Epstein and his attorneys kept pressuring prosecutors to keep the fact that they had this plea arrangement secret. And not only did they convince Acosta to keep it quiet and not even tell the victims about it, but they also persuaded Acosta to seal it, meaning nobody—the media, the public—they went out of their way to make sure this whole thing was signed and—negotiated, signed and sealed in secret.
So, by the time it was all done, Epstein appeared in court. He was sentenced. By the way, they didn’t even tell the judge. In some ways, they misled the judge to what the contents and what the gist of the deal was. They misled the judge, in court, at his sentencing hearing, about what this case was about. And it wasn’t until after he was already in prison that the—or in jail, that the women and their lawyers realized, “What just happened? How did this happen? What happened to the FBI case?” And then the prosecutors didn’t even tell them. Acosta didn’t tell them. No one would tell them exactly what the deal even contained.
They had to go to court as part of this Crime Victims’ Rights lawsuit. They filed a motion asking a federal judge to enforce. “Wait a minute. We’re crime victims. We were supposed to be told about this.” And the U.S. government, the federal prosecutors, essentially said, “Tough. You know, you’re going to have to take us to court. If you want to see what’s in this agreement, sue us.” And that’s what they had to do. And it took them months to be able to even look at the plea deal to even find out what happened. And it took almost—he was practically out of prison before the public knew the contents of this non-prosecution agreement.
I think what has shocked me most is, to be honest, is—because it’s so fresh in my mind, is the confirmation hearing that they held for Acosta, you know, last year, after he was nominated. You know, these—you know, the senators at these confirmation hearings certainly knew about this case, and he was barely questioned about it. I think Tim Kaine was the only one that asked a couple of hard questions. And then they just moved on to other topics.
It was—now, granted, this was before the #MeToo movement, when this first happened, when he was—when he was nominated. And I know that the #MeToo movement has raised a lot of the consciousness of a lot of people. But still, this was probably the most controversial case of Alex Acosta’s career, and Congress, in the Senate, barely asked any questions about it at all.
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Julie Brown
longtime investigative reporter at the Miami Herald.
— source democracynow.org, miamiherald.com | Jan 04, 2019