What people need to know most about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is not who else disported themselves with the sexual predator’s teenage victims — as much curiosity as that might satisfy.
The weightier questions include why the government let Epstein get away with his criminal behavior for so long. Who was protecting him? What blackmail, if any, did he have? Was his enormous influence entirely a result of high finance and his personal wealth, or did he carry a black bag for one or more governments? Why didn’t investigators follow the money? What did the Department of Justice do, if anything?
By 2006, there was enough evidence of criminal pedophilia to put Epstein away for decades. But Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney in Miami, agreed to let Barry Krischer, Palm Beach County’s state attorney, give Epstein a slap on the wrist for relatively minor prostitution charges.
Acosta agreed to not prosecute Epstein or his associates for anything else. Ghislaine Maxwell, now serving 20 years for being his procurer, claims in her appeal that the Acosta deal should have precluded her prosecution in New York.
A failed prosecution
A Palm Beach grand jury transcript revealed last year that Krischer’s lead prosecutor, Lanna Belohlavek, treated two child witnesses as if they were criminals themselves, and some jurors appeared to agree.
Epstein received a ludicrously light 18-month sentence, serving only 13 under a cushy work release that let him spend unsupervised time at his office while bunking in the county jail.
After his release, Epstein apparently continued to molest underage girls, despite state and federal laws treating such crimes as nonconsensual felonies. In their joint memo refusing to release more details, the Justice Department and FBI said he “harmed over one thousand victims,” each of whom “suffered unique trauma.” The best known, Virginia Giuffre, took her own life in Australia in April.
Thanks largely to Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown exposing what happened, her interest piqued by Acosta’s confirmation as Trump’s first Labor secretary, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York reopened the investigation in 2019. He accused Epstein of having abused “dozens of minor girls” in New York and at Palm Beach from 2002 through 2005.
Epstein committed suicide while awaiting trial in a federal jail, according to the Justice Department.
Dozens of surviving victims were recently in Washington to urge release of the files. Some said they would compile their own list of alleged Epstein accomplices.
Let the House vote
There is bipartisan interest in Congress. A discharge petition, which would force a vote in the House without the approval of Speaker Mike Johnson, appears close to success and should be adopted without question.
President Trump, who once promised total candor on the matter, now opposes releasing the files. That doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If Maxwell told the truth in her two-day interview with Deputy Attorney General and former Trump personal lawyer Todd Blanche, Trump has nothing to fear.
But perhaps he does.
The House Oversight Committee obtained a copy, which its Democratic members released, of what purports to be a sexually suggestive birthday letter from Trump to Epstein in 2003.
Trump has sued the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion for being the first to publish it and continues to deny authorship. When Blanche asked Maxwell, she claimed to have no memory of it.
The DOJ files probably can’t answer all of the serious public policy questions we pose in this editorial. The House and the public should also hear under oath from Acosta, Krischer and Belohlavek why they handled the case as they did.
‘Star-struck’ prosecutors
Brown’s reporting noted, among other things, that every lawyer Epstein hired had connections to a prosecutor in the earlier case. Some of those prosecutors, she said in a July 19 New York Times interview, “were star-struck by some of these lawyers like Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz.”
It could come down simply to that: prosecutors who were no match for Epstein’s A-team criminal defense, which would be bad enough. But the possibility of influence from high places cannot be eliminated without a full public inquiry by Congress.
The House should delve into the roles of Epstein’s non-governmental connections, like JP Morgan Chase, the bank that kept his business long after his conviction and despite the misgivings of some of its executives. Those were detailed in an exhaustive investigation the New York Times published this week.
Among its disclosures was a 2011 memo with Epstein as the subject. “Against all odds,” it said, the bank had been granted a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The bank said it “neither needed nor sought” Epstein’s help “for meetings with any government leaders.”
“Against all odds” also aptly describes the entire Epstein saga.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
