WASHINGTON — Former South Florida US Attorney Alex Acosta testified to House lawmakers last month that a federal prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein foundered in the mid-2000s because of a lack of victims willing to testify that would have made trial a “crapshoot,” The Post has learned.
Acosta discussed the evidentiary and other challenges prosecutors faced during a six-hour interview with Oversight Committee members and staff on Sept. 19.
“Ultimately, the trial was a crapshoot, and we just wanted the guy to go to jail,” Acosta told members of the Oversight panel, according to a transcript of the interview in which he defended his office’s non-prosecution agreement that saw Epstein sentenced to 18 months in prison after copping to state charges of soliciting sex from a minor.
According to Acosta, the case was also dogged by tactics from Epstein’s formidable defense team — which included famed advocate Alan Dershowitz and former independent counsel Kenneth Starr — that the ex-US Attorney claimed skirted the line of misconduct and that his colleagues purportedly found frustrating and “distasteful.”
“We put him in jail, he registered as a sex offender, and the victims had an opportunity to recover. And that was a win,” Acosta emphasized. “Looking at all of this, the ultimate judgment was, ‘Do you roll the dice?’ and if he gets away with it, you’re sending a signal to the community that he can get away with it.”
“A billionaire going to jail sends a strong signal to the community that this is not acceptable, that this is not right, that this cannot happen,” he added. “His registering as a sex offender puts the world on notice — whether the world listened or not we can put to one side — but it puts the world on notice that he was an offender and a sexual offender.”
That assessment was backed by main prosecuting attorney Marie Villafana, the chief of the office’s criminal division Jeffrey Sloman and his successor, Andrew Lourie.
“All favored a pre-trial resolution. It was across-the-board,” Acosta stressed, pointing out that an officer from main DOJ’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section also visited from Washington, DC, and “said that there were serious evidentiary issues,” referring to a possible trial also as a “crapshoot.”
“Many victims refused to testify. Many victims had changing stories. All of us understood why they had changing stories, but they did. And defense counsel would have — cross-examination would have been withering,” he explained.
“Many of them had issues in their background. They had MySpace pages; they had priors that would’ve been used against them by defense counsel. And that was a time when, in all candor, defense could be much, much tougher on victims on the stand.”
Elsewhere, Acosta noted that the Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office had tried to get at least three victims to testify to a state grand jury — and only one showed up.
According to the DOJ’s report, there was “great consternation” in the state attorney’s office over the possibility that some of Epstein’s alleged victims could themselves face prosecution.
Acosta went on to serve as President Trump’s labor secretary during his first term and denied in his Oversight interview that the 45th and 47th commander-in-chief was ever looked at as part of the investigation.
Asked at one point by Oversight ranking member Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), he denied the characterization that Epstein received a “sweetheart deal” — despite criticizing the failure of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and State Attorney’s Office to uphold the terms of the agreement.
“Just because you draft an indictment doesn’t mean you think it’s a slam dunk,” Acosta also said of a 60-count draft that Villafana authored, which sought a 14-to-17.5-year prison term for Epstein.
The financier, who was charged in 2019 with federal sex trafficking offenses but was found dead in his Manhattan lockup while awaiting trial in August, only ended up serving 13 months, part of which was on work release.
Acosta told Oversight members that his office was given “assurances” of “continuous confinement” — and slammed the Palm Beach sheriff as an “unreliable partner,” who authorized the work release “under a factual situation that’s sketchy at best.”
“That was the Palm Beach sheriff’s decision. When we found out about it we objected. We objected in writing. We objected fully. And so that was under the authority of the State,” he explained.
In one of the more shocking exchanges during the testimony, an Oversight staffer revealed to Acosta that a former member of his office filed articles of incorporation for a law practice that shared space with the nonprofit where Epstein completed his work release.
That lawyer, Bruce Reinhart, is now a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida and famously signed off on a search warrant of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents and other material in 2022.
Reinhart left Acosta’s office in January 2008, but had filed the articles of incorporation the previous October. He then began representing some of Epstein’s associates, including female assistants who were being probed as co-conspirators.
“As an ethical matter, as a professional matter, all of us thought that it was deploring,” Acosta said of the situation, while pointing to a 2020 DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility report that “found no impropriety. They found no improper influence. They found that everyone acted as they should have.”
The text of the non-prosecution agreement formed the basis of Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s unsuccessful appeal to the US Supreme Court to have her sex trafficking conviction overturned this year.
The 2020 DOJ report also found no victims expressing strong opinions that Epstein himself should be prosecuted.
