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, a transcript of which was obtained Friday.
“Ultimately, the trial was a crapshoot, and we just wanted the guy to go to jail,” Acosta told members of the Oversight panel in defending his office’s non-prosecution agreement that saw Epstein sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2008 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, noting that even an officer from the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section who visited from Washington, DC, “said that there were serious evidentiary issues” and also described a possible trial 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 a 2020 DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility report on the Epstein case, there was “great consternation” in the state attorney’s office over the possibility that some of Epstein’s alleged victims could also themselves face prosecution.
Epstein’s defense team also appealed to Main Justice after the signing of the non-prosecution agreement in September 2007, a move that Acosta called “absurd and unprecedented.”
Asked directly about the threat of some of the victims being prosecuted, Acosta said: “There was a woman that we considered a victim, but the State attorney did not necessarily consider a victim.”
Acosta went on to serve as President Trump’s labor secretary during his first term and denied to the Oversight Committee that the 45th and 47th commander-in-chief was ever looked at as part of the investigation.
“I did not speak with President Trump, with Donald Trump, before I was considered for Secretary of Labor,” he said.
The Oversight interview also discussed an October 2007 Page Six report that Epstein had been banned from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for trying to “use the spa to try to procure girls” — an account Trump himself confirmed to reporters in July of this year.
Asked at one point by Oversight ranking member Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), Acosta denied the characterization that Epstein received a “sweetheart deal” — criticizing the failure of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and then-State Attorney Barry Krischer’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 that 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.
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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 Florida Science Foundation, 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 Mar-a-Lago for classified documents and other material in August 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 some of the four female assistants who were being probed as co-conspirators.
The assistants included Nadia Marcinkova, Epstein’s pilot and purported “sex slave,” as well as Sarah Kellen, his scheduler, both of whom were granted immunity as part of the non-prosecution agreement.
“I don’t know if those individuals were interviewed or not by my attorneys. I simply can’t speak to it,” Acosta told lawmakers.
“As an ethical matter, as a professional matter, all of us thought that it was deploring,” Acosta also said of the Reinhardt situation, while pointing out the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility report on his office’s conduct “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.
But the 2020 DOJ report also found that Epstein’s defense team apparently succeeded in running out the clock with investigators as they were also seeking access to the financier’s computers for potential video evidence of sex crimes.
Villafana said that she had been told “the FBI had information that Epstein used hidden cameras in his New York residence to record his sexual encounters,” though Acosta testified that prosecutors were never able to establish evidence of illegality outside of South Florida.
“I don’t recall discussions about the computer evidence,” Acosta told the Oversight panel, later adding: “We didn’t have evidence of interstate travel … for purposes of sex.”
Prosecutors expressed in the 2020 report that they believed Epstein’s computers would contain the best evidence on which to build a case, either by showing direct footage of crimes or “surveillance video” of “additional victims the investigators had not yet identified” that “could have been powerful visual evidence of the large number of girls Epstein victimized.”
