More on how Epstein managed to skate: corruption

Believe it or not there are still a couple of journalists who seem honest.  One is Julie Brown, at the Miami Herald.  Julie has done a ton of good work on Epstein, and the corruption that allowed him to skate.  Details from her story of Nov. 28, 2018--which was ignored by the mainstream media. 
Gee, that's a shock, eh?

In October of 2007 the U.S. Attorney for the southern district of Florida, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz.

The two men had a past connection:  Both had worked for a D.C. law firm that keeps popping up in corruption cases: Kirkland & Ellis.

Because you'd think that the U.S. attorney for all of southern Florida might be fairly busy, the pair would have met near Acosta's office in Miami.  Instead they met 70 miles away, in West Palm Beach.

One might wonder why Acosta would be willing to travel so far.

Lefkowitz represented Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of assembling a network of underage girls for sex.  To do this he'd allegedly enlisted young female recruiters.

The case had produced a 53-page federal indictment.  Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life.

But at the breakfast meeting Acosta agreed to a deal--one that was almost certainly corrupt--under which a) all federal charges would mysteriously be dropped; b) all federal investigation would stop; and c) the feds agreed not to prosecute "any potential co-conspirators," even though these people were never named.

It's impossible to adequately explain how unbelievable and bizarre this agreement was.  No honest, competent U.S. agent would ever agree not to prosecute un-named "potential co-conspirators," since anyone in the world could claim they were availing themselves of the shelter of this agreement.

And what did Acosta get for giving this huge sweetheart deal to Lefkowitz's client?  Epstein would plead guilty to two trivial *state* charges, do a short stint in jail and would register as a sex offender.

The "extraordinary" plea deal would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes--and the identies of everyone else involved.

But wait...it gets worse:  By some mysterious twist Epstein served just 13 months in the county jail--but the deal allowed him to go to his posh office for 13 hours every day, unsupervised.

Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes.  Again, any such participants were not identified in the agreement.

But wait...it gets worse:  Federal law ("Victims' Rights Act") demanded that the federal government couldn't make sweetheart deals with abusers without giving their victims the right to object.  But as part of the "deal" Acosta agreed not to alert Epstein's victims about the deal. 
And sure enough, the bizarre deal--including the sweetheart "non-prosecution agreement"--was sealed, both before and after it was approved by a judge, thereby averting any chance that either the victims or anyone else might try to derail it.

And here we have yet another bizarre anomaly:  How could the *judge* who approved the sweetheart deal not have known about the Victims' Rights Act?  If he or she knew, why was that ignored?  Ah, yet another mystery in the growing pile.

Court records reveal that Acosta allowed Epstein’s lawyers unusual freedoms in dictating the terms of the non-prosecution agreement.

Because of Acosta's corrupt deal, neither the federal judge who had to approve the federal deal NOR the judge in the state case would know how many girls Epstein allegedly sexually abused.

Local cops in Miami were the first to investigate allegations against Epstein, beginning in 2001.  But despite their reports up the chain, authorities did nothing.  After Miami cops began to suspect that this was due to corruption by agents in the Palm Beach state attorney’s office they referred the case to the FBI.

Ah, that'll start some real investigations, eh citizen?

Hahahahahahaha!  I see you're not familiar with the new, improved, Deep-State FBI, which has as its top mission the prosecution of innocents and the protection of the guilty--as long as they keep donating money to Democrats.

Over the past year the Miami Herald examined the full, unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police investigation and witness statements that had been kept under seal.

The Herald learned that, as part of the plea deal, Epstein provided what the government called “valuable consideration” for unspecified information he supplied to federal investigators.  There is no record of what the supposedly valuable information was.

Victims have filed a federal lawsuit against the federal government, claiming Epstein’s federal non-prosecution agreement was illegal.  Federal attorneys responded that the sweetheart deal Acosta gave Epstein didn't violate the Victims’ Rights Act because no federal charges were ever filed in the case--since Acosta agreed to dismiss all federal charges.

That argument that was later dismissed by the judge.

The Epstein case is yet another example of how there are two systems of justice in America, one for the rich and one for those who aren't connected.  In this case there was "an unusual level of collaboration" between federal prosecutors and Epstein’s legal team that even government lawyers have admitted was unusual.

In email after email, Acosta and the lead *federal* prosecutor, Marie Villafaña, acquiesced to Epstein’s legal team’s demands, which often focused on ways to limit the scandal by shutting out his victims and the media, including suggesting that the charges be filed in Miami instead of Palm Beach, where Epstein’s victims lived.

Before the deal was sealed Villafaña wrote to Lefkowitz in a September 2007 email,
“On an ‘avoid the press’ note ... I can file the charge in district court in Miami which will hopefully cut the press coverage significantly. Do you want to check that out?’’

Federal prosecutors identified 36 underage victims.  Those victims who heard about the sentencing on the news didn’t understand what had happened to the federal probe that they’d been assured was ongoing.

An attorney for one of the victims filed an emergency motion in federal court to block the sealed "non-prosecution agreement" from being enforced, but by the time the agreement was unsealed over a year later Epstein had already served his sentence and been released from jail.

Epstein continued to receive VIP handling in his sentencing details. Convicted child sex offenders jailed in state prisons are often beaten.  Epstein would have none of that, so instead of being sent to state prison he was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail.
And the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office allowed Epstein to leave the jail six days a week, for 12 hours a day, to go to a comfortable office that Epstein had set up in West Palm Beach.

This was granted despite explicit sheriff’s department rules stating that sex offenders don’t qualify for work release.

Wow, yet another "two sets of laws," eh?

The sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, refused to answer questions from the Miami Herald about how Epstein had managed to break the explicit rules regarding sex offenders not being eligible for work release.

Hey, if the top agents of the U.S. and state governments are corrupt, how can anyone be surprised if some little munchkin down the chain knocks down a few thousand in a bribe, eh?

During depositions taken as part of two dozen lawsuits filed against him by his victims, Epstein has invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, in one instance doing so more than 200 times.

In the past, his lawyers have said that the girls lied about their ages, that their stories were exaggerated or untrue and that they were unreliable witnesses prone to drug use.

But wait...it gets worse:  Remember that part of the sweetheart plea deal required Epstein to register as a sex offender?  Well...in 2011 Epstein petitioned to have his sex offender status level reduced in New York, where he has a home and is required to register every 90 days.  He'd been classified as a level 3 offender — the highest level.

Astonishingly, Epstein didn't even need to have his own attorney do the request.  Instead the assistant head of the sex crimes unit--who was also a deputy district attorney for New York County--made that case on Epstein’s behalf before New York Supreme Court judge Ruth Pickholtz.  The DA claimed that the Florida case never led to an indictment and that his underage victims failed to cooperate in the case, so Epstein's status should be reduced.

Pickholtz expressed astonishment that a New York prosecutor would make such a request on behalf of a serial child sex offender, and denied the petition.  “I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this," said the judge.

When the deputy chief of the sex crimes unit in the Manhattan DA's office petitions for a sex offender's status to be eased, what does this tell you about the honesty of the entire Manhattan DA system?

Palm Beach cops said the evidence they collected overwhelmingly  supported the girls’ stories, including cell phone records.

Eventually, the girls told them about still other girls and young women they had seen at Epstein’s house, many of whom didn’t speak English, Recarey said. That led Recarey to suspect that Epstein’s exploits weren’t just confined to Palm Beach. Police obtained the flight logs for his private plane, and found female names and initials among the list of people who flew on the aircraft — including the names of some famous and powerful people who had also been passengers, Recarey said.

A newly released FBI report shows that at the time the non-prosecution deal was executed, the agency was interviewing witnesses and victims “from across the United States.” The probe stretched from Florida to New York and New Mexico, records show. The report was released by the FBI in response to a lawsuit filed by Radar Online and was made available on the bureau’s website after the Miami Herald and other news organizations submitted requests, said Daniel Novack, the lawyer who filed the Freedom of Information Act case pro bono.

One lawsuit, still pending in New York, alleges that Epstein used an international modeling agency to recruit girls as young as 13 from Europe, Ecuador and Brazil. The girls lived in a New York building owned by Epstein, who paid for their visas.

Mike Fisten, a former Miami-Dade police sergeant who was also a homicide investigator and a member of the FBI Organized Crime Task Force, said the FBI had enough evidence to put Epstein away for a long time but was overruled by Acosta.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Villafaña, in court papers, said prosecutors used their “best efforts’’ to comply with the Victims’ Rights Act, but exercised their “prosecutorial discretion’’ when they chose not to notify the victims. The reasoning went like this: The non-prosecution deal had a restitution clause that provided the girls a chance to seek compensation from Epstein. Had the deal fallen through, necessitating a trial, Epstein’s lawyers might have used the prior restitution clause to undermine the girls’ credibility as witnesses, by claiming they had exaggerated Epstein’s behavior in hopes of cashing in.

Acosta has never fully explained why he felt it was in the best interests of Epstein's victims to agree to seal the sweetheart plea "deal," nor why the FBI investigation was closed even though investigation was yielding more victims and evidence of a possible sex-trafficking conspiracy extending far, far beyond Palm Beach.