Acosta used ‘poor judgment’ in Epstein case but did no wrongdoing, agency finds
Senator calling for the full report to be released to the public
MIAMI — Former U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta used “poor judgment” when he chose not to prosecute Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein on federal sex trafficking charges and instead let him plead guilty to a state offence of soliciting young girls for sex, the Justice Department said Thursday.
The department’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded Acosta, who served as labour secretary in the Trump administration until the scandal over his mishandling of the Epstein case forced him to resign in July 2019, committed no professional wrongdoing and violated no ethics standards. The agency released an executive summary, but the full report said the decision did not involve corruption, according to persons familiar with it.
The summary said the office had reviewed “hundreds of thousands of records,” including emails, letters, memos and investigative materials. It had also conducted “more than 60 interviews of witnesses, including the FBI case agents, their supervisors, and FBI administrative personnel; current and former USAO staff and attorneys; current and former department attorneys and senior managers, including a former deputy attorney general and a former assistant attorney general for the criminal division; and the former state attorney and former assistant state attorney in charge of the state investigation of Epstein.”
Stopping short of alleging ethical violations, the summary was critical of Acosta’s entering into a nonprosecution agreement, or NPA, that spared Epstein harsh punishment.
“In sum, Acosta’s application of federalism principles was too expansive, his view of the federal interest in prosecuting Epstein was too narrow, and his understanding of the state system was too imperfect to justify the decision to use the NPA,” the report’s summary said.
One key Republican senator was more critical.
“Letting a well-connected billionaire get away with child rape and international sex trafficking isn’t ‘poor judgment’ — it is a disgusting failure. Americans ought to be enraged,” Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, chair of the Senate Judiciary Oversight Subcommittee, said in a statement Thursday. “Jeffrey Epstein should be rotting behind bars today, but the Justice Department failed Epstein’s victims at every turn.”
Sasse, who had pressed the Justice Department for more than three years to investigate the handling of Epstein’s charges, demanded that the agency release the report.
“The DOJ’s crooked deal with Epstein effectively shut down investigations into his child sex trafficking ring and protected his co-conspirators in other states. Justice has not been served,” he said. “The full report needs to be released to the public. OPR might have finished its report, but we have an obligation to make sure this never happens again.”
In a statement, the Justice Department said it shared on Thursday an executive summary of the report with victims and the full report with a congressional committee.
“While OPR did not find that department attorneys engaged in professional misconduct, OPR concluded that the victims were not treated with the forthrightness and sensitivity expected by the department,” the state said. “OPR also concluded that former U.S. Attorney Acosta exercised poor judgment by deciding to resolve the federal investigation through the nonprosecution agreement and when he failed to make certain that the State of Florida intended to and would notify victims identified through the federal investigation about the state plea hearing.”
Among the federal prosecutors who avoided criticism in the report were Acosta’s former top assistant, Jeffrey Sloman; ex-criminal chief Matthew Menchel; and the former case prosecutor, Marie Villafana, who had prepared a sex trafficking indictment against Epstein that was not filed. Her boss Andrew Lourie was also absolved.
The OPR investigation was prompted in large part by the 2018 Miami Herald series Perversion of Justice that renewed interest in both the sweetheart deal and in prosecution of Epstein and associates.
Sloman, who served as Acosta’s first assistant during the Epstein prosecution, declined to comment. In an op-ed piece published last year in the Miami Herald, Sloman acknowledged that “Epstein deserved harsher punishment than he ended up getting.”
At the same time, Sloman defended Acosta’s integrity in handling the case, saying that “based on the Miami Herald’s ’Perversion of Justice’ series and the ensuing news coverage, you may also believe that wellconnected lawyers corrupted now-Secretary of Labor and then-U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta and his team into giving Epstein a sweetheart deal. They did not. I would know. I was there.”
“Our priorities were to make sure Epstein could not hurt anyone else and to compensate Epstein’s victims without retraumatizing them,” Sloman wrote in February 2019, just months before Acosta resigned as labour secretary.
The Office of Professional Responsibility is a non-partisan division of the Justice Department, formed in 1975 in response to the Watergate scandal and run by career prosecutors. It investigates allegations of professional misconduct by DOJ prosecutors and immigration judges.
On its website, it cites 55 investigations over the past four fiscal years. Before the Acosta report, it listed six investigations of “significant public interest,” a rarer phenomenon, since 2008. Most recently, in May 2018 it absolved two U.S. attorneys from the Southern District of Virginia of allegations of crimes but found they failed to properly share information with lawyers for defendant Massey Ferguson, owner of a West Virginia coal mine that exploded in 2010 and killed 38 miners.