The House Oversight Committee announced Monday that former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta will appear voluntarily before the panel next month as part of its investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Attorneys for Epstein’s victims had raised concerns about why the Republican-led committee did not include Acosta, who served in the first Trump administration, when it sent subpoenas to a number of high profile former government officials as part of the probe.
Acosta was the U.S. Attorney in Florida for the Southern District of Florida in 2008 when the office reached a secret non-prosecution agreement with Epstein, who wound up pleading guilty to state charges involving a single underaged victim, protecting him from federal prosecution.
A Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility investigation into the Epstein deal found it was Acosta who “made the pivotal decision to resolve the federal investigation of Epstein through a state-based plea and either developed or approved the terms of the initial offer to the defense that set the beginning point for the subsequent negotiations that led to the [non-prosecution agreement].”
The November 2020 report also found that Acosta’s top lieutenants went around the FBI, the federal prosecutor investigating the case and the victims by making an offer for Epstein to plea to state charges.
The deal resulted in Epstein serving 13 months in a Palm Beach jail, where he was allowed to leave almost daily through a work-release program and have his own private security detail. He could have faced up to life behind bars had he been convicted of the charges in a federal complaint that was shelved as a result of the deal.
Resurfaced reporting about Acosta’s role in the plea deal led him to step down as labor secretary in 2019.
Despite that, his name was not included in the initial batch of subpoenas sent out by the committee this month. Among those named were former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and several top former Justice Department officials, including former Attorneys General Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, William Barr, Merrick Garland, Jeff Sessions and Alberto Gonzales, who’d been Acosta’s boss when he was in Florida.
“How can any genuine investigation into the federal government’s sweetheart deal with Epstein (including the extraordinary grant of blanket immunity to all his named and unnamed co-conspirators) omit Alex Acosta?” Epstein victim attorney Jack Scarola said in a statement to NBC News after the subpoenas were released.
Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the panel, said Monday that the about face came after “weeks of pressure” from Democrats.
A person familiar with the situation told NBC News that the committee approached Acosta “about a week-and-a-half ago about coming in for a voluntary transcribed interview.”
The Acosta interview is scheduled for Sept. 19.
The committee said Monday an additional subpoena is being sent to the Epstein estate for “the circumstances and subsequent investigations of Mr. Epstein’s death, the operation of sex-trafficking rings and ways for the federal government to effectively combat them, and potential violations of ethics rules related to elected officials.”
That subpoena includes a demand for “All entries contained within the reported leather-bound book compiled by Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell for Mr. Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday” in 2003.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the book includes a “bawdy” birthday card sent to Epstein by Donald Trump.
NBC News has not independently verified the documents in the book, and Trump denied sending such a letter. The president filed a defamation suit against the newspaper’s publisher, two of its reporters and News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch, over the story. A Dow Jones spokesperson said at the time, “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said in a post on social media that the Epstein estate has “indicated it would comply with a subpoena with redactions to protect victims. The pressure is working. Let’s keep pushing for transparency & justice for survivors.”
As for the subpoenas to former law enforcement officials, Barr has already met with the committee, and the panel said Monday it will accept formal written declarations from Gonzales, Holder and Sessions under penalty of prosecution for false statements stating they possess no information about the Epstein case or about his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maxwell is serving 20 years on sex trafficking charges. She’s appealing her conviction.
Epstein died by suicide in his jail cell 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges in New York.
The case returned to the headlines this summer when the Justice Department and FBI announced in an unsigned joint memo that they agreed Epstein’s death was the result of a suicide, that no other people were expected to be charged and that no further information about the case would be released.
The move outraged many Trump supporters, because he and his allies had stoked conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death and had vowed to have transparency in the case.
The House Oversight Committee also subpoenaed the Justice Department for its investigative files in the case, which total about 100,000 pages. The panel said it received about a third of those documents on Friday, and that more would be turned over in the future.