A wrist slap for a serial sex abuser

TheDailyBeast.com

A massive pedophile scandal has reached into the Trump administration, said Liz Mair, and it should cost Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta his job. In a major exposé, the Miami Herald last week detailed how the criminal justice system let a serial sex abuser, the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, off the hook after he’d recruited and molested more than 80 girls, mostly between the ages of 13 and 16. Epstein, a politically connected slimeball who befriended both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump and hired famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz to defend him, faced a life sentence for his many crimes, which included an international effort to recruit underage girls for his sex ring. But Acosta, then the U.S. attorney in Miami, somehow let Epstein plead guilty to just two felony prostitution charges and gave him a mere 13 months in a county jail. Epstein was permitted to spend most of that sentence in work-release at his Palm Beach office. And Acosta and Epstein’s lawyers agreed to keep the whole plea deal secret. Why? “At best,” Acosta thought the rich and powerful deserved special treatment. “At worst,” he may be “crooked” and was bought off. Either way, he should not be heading up a federal agency.