Barr removes prisons boss after Epstein suicide in N.Y.

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr removed the acting director of the Bureau of Prisons from his position Monday, more than a week after millionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein took his own life while in federal custody.

Hugh Hurwitz’s reassignment comes amid mounting evidence that guards at the chronically understaffed Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York abdicated their responsibility to keep the 66-year-old Epstein from killing himself while he awaited trial on charges of sexually abusing teenage girls. The FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general are investigating his death.

Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger was also killed on Hurwitz’s watch, in a federal prison in West Virginia last October, just after he was transferred there.

Barr named Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the prison agency’s director from 1992 until 2003, to replace Hurwitz. Hurwitz is moving to a role as an assistant director in charge of the bureau’s reentry programs, where he will work with Barr on putting in place the First Step Act, a criminal justice overhaul.

The bureau has come under intense scrutiny since Epstein’s death, with lawmakers and Barr demanding answers about how Epstein was left unsupervised and able to take his own life on Aug. 10 while held at one of the most secure federal jails in America.

A statement from Barr gave no specific reason for the reassignment. But Barr said last week that officials had uncovered “serious irregularities” and he was angry that staff members at the jail had failed to “adequately secure this prisoner.”

He ordered the bureau last Tuesday to temporarily reassign the warden, Lamine N’Diaye, to a regional office and the two guards who were supposed to be watching Epstein were placed on administrative leave.

“This is a good start, but it’s not the end,” Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Attorney General Barr did the right thing by removing the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and he ought to make every effort to prosecute every one of Epstein’s co-conspirators to the fullest extent of the law.”