Some of the most revealing moments from the sordid saga of Jeffrey Epstein came when government officials were asked direct questions, then ducked them without any real explanation. Case in point: Five years ago, the Labor Secretary at the time, Alex Acosta, was speaking to reporters about his handling of the first Epstein criminal case from 2008, when Acosta was a U.S. Attorney in Florida. This was the press conference right before Acosta’s resignation as Labor Secretary. For roughly an hour, Acosta tried to explain why his office had offered an extremely lenient plea deal to Epstein — one that offered immunity to his co-conspirators, and barely required Epstein to spend any time in a jail cell. Acosta was generally responsive to most questions during this press conference. In fact, at one point, he waved off his assistant who wanted to end the press conference early.
But there was one question that Alex Acosta very clearly did not want to answer. It concerned reporting in the Daily Beast that, in a discussion with Trump administration officials before his appointment as Labor Secretary, Alex Acosta had said that Epstein, “belonged to intelligence.” In other words, Acosta had reportedly suggested to the Trump team that, when he was the U.S. Attorney, he was told by senior U.S. government officials to go easy on Epstein so that he could stay out of jail. Presumably, the idea was that Epstein could then continue connecting various powerful figures to his sex-trafficking ring. That would, in turn, benefit U.S. intelligence agencies in some way. Maybe they might want to blackmail Epstein’s associates or collect information about them, for example.
Here’s how Alex Acosta answered — or rather, didn’t answer — a reporter’s question about the Daily Beast’s reporting:
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