Alex Acosta, former US attorney who negotiated Epstein’s plea deal, appears before House Oversight Committee

(WASHINGTON) — Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida who negotiated a plea deal in 2008 with Jeffrey Epstein, arrived on Capitol Hill Friday morning to testify before the House Oversight Committee behind closed doors.

Acosta, who served as the Labor Secretary during the first Trump administration, did not respond to several shouted questions as he walked into the committee room.

Acosta resigned his position at the Labor Department after more than two years in the job amid controversy over his role in the 2008 plea deal with Epstein. At the time, he defended his decision, saying his goal “was straightforward” and included putting Epstein behind bars.

With continued interest in the Epstein matter on Capitol Hill, Acosta now finds himself testifying at a closed-door deposition.

“We want to know what went on during the prosecution, when many believe that Epstein was awarded a sweetheart plea deal. So, we’re going to ask a lot of questions about this. This is going to be a pretty hard-hitting deposition,” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said ahead of Acosta’s interview Friday.

Comer said the committee will have “a lot of questions” for Acosta.

“So according to the victims and the survivors of Epstein, there was a lot of warning about the crimes that Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell were committing. But yet, it appears the government let the victims down, and they didn’t, they didn’t prosecute. So, Acosta was a major player in that,” Comer claimed.

While this is the first time Acosta will be questioned by Congress about the Epstein deal, his actions and decisions during the investigation in Florida beginning in 2005, and the resulting non-prosecution agreement (NPA), have already received considerable scrutiny.

A lawsuit against the Justice Department, in which Epstein’s victims challenged the legality of the NPA, exposed much of the correspondence between Epstein’s lawyers and prosecutors in advance of the negotiated plea. Acosta himself spoke extensively about the deal at a press conference in 2019, before his resignation from his post as Labor Secretary. And a Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) investigation in 2020 — for which Acosta provided sworn testimony — examined in detail the decisions made by Acosta and his top deputies in the course of negotiations with Epstein’s lawyers.

Acosta has long defended his decision to enter into plea negotiations with Epstein as the best path forward at the time. His office and the FBI had picked up the case — which involved allegations of sexual exploitation of dozens of minor girls — after the Town of Palm Beach Police Chief expressed outrage at the way the case was being handled by the state prosecutor, who had presented the case to a grand jury, returning a single count indictment against Epstein for solicitation of prostitution.

“The goal here was straightforward,” Acosta said in July 2019, four days after Epstein was arrested in New York on child sex-trafficking charges. “Put Epstein behind bars, ensure he registered as a sexual offender, provide victims with a means to seek restitution, and protect the public by putting them on notice that a sexual predator was within their midst.”

Still, the congressional committee’s investigators are expected to press Acosta on a number of fronts, particularly on his decision to enter into plea negotiations in the summer of 2007, while a 60-count draft federal indictment against Epstein was gathering dust in the office of the lead prosecutor on the case. The negotiations and resulting plea deal also occurred, according to the OPR report, while the FBI and Acosta’s prosecutors were still investigating the case and identifying new victims in other jurisdictions. The deal was also signed before the FBI or prosecutors had made any concerted effort to try to gain the cooperation of Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators, according to the report.

The OPR report called it “troubling” that Acosta decided to resolve that case through a negotiated plea before the investigation was completed.

“As the investigation progressed, the FBI continued to locate additional victims, and many had not been interviewed by the FBI by the time of the initial offer. In other words, at the time of Acosta’s decision, the [government] did not know the full scope of Epstein’s conduct; whether, given Epstein’s other domestic and foreign residences, his criminal conduct had occurred in other locations; or whether the additional victims might implicate other offenders,” the report said.

Acosta is also likely to face questions on repeated meetings and consultations he and his top deputies engaged in with Epstein’s high-powered legal team, several of whom previously work as federal prosecutors in the same office in Miami and others who previously worked with Acosta at a white-shoe law firm.

According to the Justice Department’s OPR report, the line prosecutor, A. Marie Villafaña, objected to the access that was being granted by the office to Epstein’s defense counsel.

“As the lead prosecutor, Villafaña vehemently opposed meeting with Epstein’s attorneys and voiced her concerns to her supervisors, but was overruled by them,” the report said, noting that senior prosecutors viewed the meetings as primarily “listening sessions” that could be helpful for learning how the defense intended to attack the credibility of certain witnesses and perceived weaknesses in the case.

Villafaña said she feared her office was “going down the same path” the state of Florida had gone down in allowing Epstein’s defense attorneys to persuade prosecutors not to file serious charges, and she feared the delays might allow Epstein to continue to offend, the report said. Villafaña told OPR she believed Acosta was “influenced by the stature of Epstein’s attorneys” and that the defense lawyers convinced some members of the prosecution team that the case was “extremely novel and legally complex.”

“It was not as legally complex as they made it out to be,” Villafaña told OPR.

After examining the scope of the relationships, OPR said it could not “rule out the possibility” that prosecutors may have been willing to meet with Epstein’s lawyers because they knew them, but concluded “OPR did not find evidence supporting a conclusion that the meetings themselves resulted in any substantial benefit to the defense.”

Ultimately, the OPR report found that Acosta had exercised “poor judgment” in making the deal with Epstein, but found that neither Acosta nor any of the prosecutors in the office had committed professional misconduct or had violated any clear and unambiguous rules of the DOJ. At the time the OPR was made public in 2020, attorneys for Epstein’s victims called the report “offensive” and a “whitewash.”

Acosta’s interview with the committee Friday will be under oath and his testimony will be transcribed. The committee is expected to make the transcript public in the coming weeks.

Comer said the committee’s Epstein investigation is “very serious” and “fast moving.”

“The Trump administration is fully cooperating with us in this investigation. We’re going to continue to get more documents in from the ]Epstein] estate, unredacted, and we will be able to answer some more questions,” Comer added.

Earlier this month the committee released tens of thousands of records related to Epstein, provided by the Department of Justice in response to a committee subpoena. A review of the documents released by the committee indicates they largely consist of public court filings and transcripts from Maxwell’s trial, previously released flight logs from Epstein’s plane, already public Bureau of Prisons communications the night of Epstein’s death and various other public court papers from Epstein’s criminal case in Florida.

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