Of all the witnesses who know where the proverbial and possibly literal Epstein bodies are buried, it would be hard to find one with more pertinent information than one Alex Acosta.
When he was serving as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida in the aughts, Acosta cut what might be the most egregious non-prosecution plea deal in American history with one Jeffrey Epstein.
Related: AG Pam Bondi: Still-Unreleased Epstein Files to Be Redacted for ‘National Security’
To ostensibly help answer lingering questions around that deal, Acosta appeared for a closed-door testimony to Congress last week.
Via CNN (emphasis added):
Former US attorney [Alexander Acosta] who negotiated a controversial 2008 plea deal with Jeffrey Epstein defended that agreement in a closed-door meeting with House investigators Friday, according to Democrats in the room…
According to a readout from the panel, Acosta expressed concern over the hours-long testimony to the House Oversight Committee that had prosecutors lost at trial, it could have sent a message that the late convicted sex offender’s crimes could continue. A key issue in the US Southern District of Florida’s handling of the case was whether it should be prosecuted federally or locally, he said, per the readout…
Acosta, they said, told investigators he didn’t see sufficient evidence to move forward with the case even though approximately 40 women had come forward to share their accounts of sexual assault.
So, to summarize, Alexander Ocasta decided not to fully prosecute the case against Jeffrey Epstein out of fear that, if he failed to fully prosecuted the case, that might signal that Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t be prosecuted for his crimes.
Makes total sense.
I can imagine legitimate circumstances in which closed-door testimony to the people’s representatives in Congress might be warranted, but this is not one of them; there is no bona fide national security reason to allow this, nor can I conceive of any other justification that makes sense.
FBI Director Kash Patel, in his own testimony to Congress last week, which was not secretly conducted away from the press, described the Acosta plea deal for Epstein as the “original sin” in the case (emphasis added):
Now I know that there’s a lot of talk about Epstein. And I’m here to testify that the original sin in the Epstein case was the way it was initially brought by Mr. Acosta back in 2006.
The original case involved a very limited search warrant or set of search warrants and didn’t take as much investigatory material it should have seized.
If I were the FBI director then, it wouldn’t have happened. The search warrants were limited to small time periods to include 2002 to 2005 and 1997 to 2001. Mr. Acosta allowed Epstein to enter in 2008 to a plea and non prosecution agreement, which then the courts issued mandates and protective orders legally prohibiting anyone from ever seeing that material ever again without the permission of the court.
The non-prosecution agreements also bar future prosecutions for those involved at that time of those individuals.
According to his own alleged admissions, Acosta evidently knows things about Jeffrey Epstein’s and his ties to intelligence agencies that are very much in the public interest to ascertain — on the record, in front of cameras, with full audio and video.
Via The Daily Beast, 2019 (emphasis added):
Epstein’s name… had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who’d infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and trafficking.
“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.)
Related: AG Pam Bondi Vows Federal Crackdown on ‘Hate Speech’
Who allegedly told Acosta to “leave it alone”?
Did Acosta discuss the plea deal with the higher levels of the DOJ before greenlighting the deal?
Who was in the room when Acosta allegedly told the Trump transition team that he was informed Epstein worked for intelligence?
Now, if you’re wary of reporting from The Daily Beast, that’s entirely understandable.
But consider this fumbling, highly suspect response that Acosta gave — what they call in the PR industry a “non-denial denial” — when asked about his reported statements that Epstein was “intelligence” and make up your own mind regarding who’s lying about what.
As for Acosta himself, as a member of the Newsmax board in good standing, he could presumably easily book an interview and put all the wild speculation to bed.
Via Newsmax, June 2025 (emphasis added):
Newsmax… today announced the appointment of Ambassador Paula J. Dobriansky to the Company's Board of Directors, effective immediately. Dobriansky will serve as a member of the Audit Committee alongside former U.S. Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, who was appointed to the Board upon the closing of the Company's initial public offering in March of this year…
Mr. Acosta's diverse experiences include serving as Chairman of U.S. Century Bank, as Dean of the FIU College of Law, as U.S. Attorney and Assistant Attorney General at the Department of Justice, as a Member of the National Labor Relations Board, as a Senior Fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and as an analyst at Lehman Brothers. Following law school, Mr. Acosta worked as a law clerk for then U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Samuel A. Alito, and as an associate, primarily in labor law and in appeals, at Kirkland & Ellis.
I read through the entire above press release announcing Acosta’s appointment to the Newsmax board; nowhere, oddly, is there any mention of Acosta’s handling of the Epstein case, arguably that for which he is best known.
Weird.
