Alexander Acosta, the former US attorney for the southern district of Florida who negotiated a plea deal in 2008 with Jeffrey Epstein, testified before the House oversight committee last month that going to trial would have been a “crapshoot” due to lack of cooperation from victims.
In a transcript of the six-hour interview released on Friday, the former prosecutor, who later served in the first Trump administration, described the evidentiary hurdles Epstein’s federal prosecution would have faced, and why his office turned the case over to Florida state prosecutors that resulted in the disgraced financier pleading guilty to charges of soliciting sex from a minor.
“Ultimately, the trial was a crapshoot, and we just wanted the guy to go to jail,” Acosta told members of the oversight panel.
Questions over the government’s non-prosecution agreement with Epstein have hung heavily over the scandal, generating conspiracy theories over the presence of larger forces at work.
Acosta said it was the opinion of the government’s prosecution team that “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”.
Epstein’s registering as a sex offender as part of the non-prosecution agreement, he added, “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”.
If the 14-count federal case had gone to trial and the government had lost, Acosta argued, “that says that he got away with it, that you can do that more. And so we thought it was very, very important to send that signal, and that’s why – that’s one reason we favored the negotiated plea”.
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 – but only one had shown up. Acosta said federal prosecutors were uncertain that they could successfully prosecute Epstein given inconsistencies in some victims’ accounts.
“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.”
But in making a non-prosecution deal with Epstein – one that Maxwell later tried to use as a basis for an appeal against her 2021 sex-trafficking conviction but was rejected earlier this month by the supreme court – Acosta said prosecutors anticipated that Florida authorities would ensure that Epstein served out his 13-month sentence in jail.
“We had an assurance that he would be in continuous confinement,” Acosta said. Later in the interview, he added: “Had we known that he was going to get work release, this would not have gone forward.”
But Acosta denied that Donald Trump, a friend of Epstein’s until a falling out over a property deal and a dispute over Epstein attempting to hire staff away from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago business, had ever been consulted about it. “He moved in circles that I did not move in,” he said.
The transcript release comes on the day that Britain’s Prince Andrew agreed to give up his royal title of the Duke of York and other honors after it was revealed that he continued his friendship with Epstein after he said it had ended in a 2019 TV interview.
The new release also comes days ahead of a posthumously published memoir by Virginia Giuffre, who claims she was trafficked to Andrew by Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell on three occasions when she was 17.
In the interview with the oversight committee Acosta indicated that Epstein’s defense team, which included constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz and former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, came close to unethical.
“Everyone is entitled to an aggressive defense,” Acosta said. “I don’t think the line was crossed. I don’t think there was misconduct … but it was distasteful. It did frustrate our attorneys.”
Earlier, Robert Garcia, a Democratic representative on the oversight committee, released a letter to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, demanding that she end her efforts to obstruct the body’s investigation into Epstein.
Garcia claimed that Bondi had refused to comply with a congressional subpoena to release the full Epstein files or co-operate with its investigation into “a corrupt quid-quo-pro between the DOJ and Ghislaine Maxwell”.
Garcia said the “the ongoing refusal” to provide the committee with information “demonstrates the Trump administration’s contempt for providing transparency to the American people about Epstein’s crimes”.
