Alysin Camerota had a lengthy interview this morning with Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown (Philly girl!), who broke the Epstein story wide open.
Camerota asked about Acosta saying the prosecutor made attempts to notify the victims.
"How that was, at Friday afternoon at 4:15 and that she learned that the state had scheduled the plea for 8:30 the following Monday. And she talks about how she made every effort to notify the victims at that time.
"Is it true the federal prosecutor, the she in this case, couldn't connect with any of the 36 victims to let them know about this in that 72-hour period?" Camerota said.
"I don't believe that's true at all," Brown said, and explained why.
"This was coming down the pike for quite a while. Even if it was true, why wouldn't you postpone the hearing? It's not like they didn't have the power to say, look, let's do this -- they did it first thing on a Monday morning. They called a couple of people who were, like, wait. What is this about? That was the other thing. They didn't even tell the people that they did reach exactly why Epstein was going to be in court. So some of the victims' attorney were under the impression that he was pleading to a state charge but that the federal investigation was still continuing. And the judge ruled in this case that they did -- prosecutors did mislead the victims in thinking they were going forward with the case, all the way through until the sentence."
"Obviously all this begs the question why. Why did Acosta do this? Why did he seem friendlier to Jeffrey Epstein and his attorney than to the victims? Why did he break with convention in this case so radically? And that hasn't been answered yet. Reporters often have a lot more information than they print or than they broadcast. And I'm just wondering if you know if there will be more coming out what the back story was on Acosta," Camerota said.
"I hope so. I think whenever an investigative reporter does this, you hope that you're going to find the 'I got you' thing. And I really didn't find that. You know, there's a lot of different things you can surmise from the emails that went back and forth. He had a real history with these lawyers. Epstein was very shrewd. He hired lawyers Acosta looked up to."
"So maybe -- did you conclude it's cronyism? that he had a friendly past relationship with those lawyers?" Camerota asked.
"Not only cronyism, but it was also ambition, I think. To some degree, it worked. He's a cabinet member now. And, you know, the sad part about this is that all his prosecutors that worked in that office from what we can see also fell in line behind him. So some of the documents that he was passing out yesterday, for example, saying well, this person and that person agreed with the decision. How are they not going to agree with it? You're their boss," Brown said.
"He was the top prosecutor in Miami that time. One of the things he said was this was ten years ago, times were different, this was the best deal that could be gotten. It was too risky. It was a roll of the dice I think were his words to try to go to trial. and of course rape cases are a roll of the dice. Everything is a roll of the dice when you go to trial. Was this the best deal they could have ever gotten?" Camerota asked.
"No. The Palm Beach police did a masterful job on this investigation. They were very, very disappointed. that's probably a light word to use. In the way that this was handled both by the state prosecutor, by the way, and Acosta's office. The reality is if you don't feel that you have enough manpower to make this case, it's the Department of Justice. You can call on people to help in other cities. At the time that this happened, they had an inkling that he was doing this in New York, New Mexico, probably in the U.S. Virgin Islands. So they should have -- he should have asked for help. He should have continued the case. He should have tried, for example, flip one of the people who worked for him. He had a whole menagerie of people who worked for him. Pilots and schedulers and drivers, you know, it just went on and on and on.
"And so why didn't you get one of them to talk? Why didn't you get his computers? His computers were -- they never subpoenaed his computers."
Imagine. Sex crimes involving multiple minors, and they never subpoenaed his computers.
