Alexander Acosta

Alexander Acosta (born January 16, 1969) is an American lawyer who served as United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida from 2005 to 2009 and as United States Secretary of Labor from 2017 to 2019. As US Attorney he supervised the office that negotiated the 2008 non-prosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein, an arrangement under which Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges in Florida, served a 13-month jail term with work release, and obtained federal immunity for himself and named co-conspirators. A federal judge later ruled that prosecutors violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by concealing the deal from victims, and Acosta resigned as Secretary of Labor in July 2019 amid renewed scrutiny of the agreement.¹²

The 2008 Non-Prosecution Agreement

Federal investigators in the Southern District of Florida identified roughly 30, and ultimately more than 30, minors whom Epstein was alleged to have sexually abused, after the Palm Beach Police Department referred the case to the FBI on concerns that the local prosecution would be too lenient. By May 2007 government lawyers had prepared an 82-page prosecution memorandum and a 53-page draft federal indictment charging Epstein with multiple federal sex offenses. Acosta decided in 2007 to negotiate with Epstein's defense team rather than seek that indictment.¹³

The non-prosecution agreement, negotiated through 2007 and executed in stages, required Epstein to plead guilty in Palm Beach County court, which he did in June 2008, to state charges including soliciting prostitution and procuring a person under 18 for prostitution. He was sentenced to 18 months, of which he served roughly 13, under conditions that allowed extensive work release, permitting him to spend up to 16 hours a day, six or seven days a week, away from the county jail. Epstein's defense team included high-profile lawyers such as Alan Dershowitz, Kenneth Starr, and Roy Black, who pressed the office for concessions.¹³

The agreement extended immunity from federal prosecution to Epstein, to four named co-conspirators, and to unnamed "potential co-conspirators," language read as shielding others who helped recruit or conceal the abuse. The terms were not disclosed to the identified victims while the deal was being finalized, and the agreement was sealed. The breadth of the immunity provisions, the sealing, and the leniency of the sentence became the basis for years of subsequent litigation and official review. The attorney Bradley Edwards, representing victims, led the legal challenge to the agreement.¹⁴

Crime Victims' Rights Act Ruling

In the case styled Doe v. United States, No. 08-80736, brought by victims including Courtney Wild and Jane Doe 2 to enforce their rights, United States District Judge Kenneth Marra ruled on February 21, 2019, that the government had violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by failing to confer with the victims before entering the non-prosecution agreement. Marra wrote that "particularly problematic was the government's decision to conceal the existence of the" agreement and to "mislead the victims to believe that federal prosecution was still a possibility," finding that prosecutors had counseled the victims to have "patience" while the deal was being finalized.⁵

In a later ruling, Marra declined to invalidate the non-prosecution agreement itself, noting that Epstein had died and that rescission would not restore the victims' position, and he held that the victims were not entitled to monetary damages from the government under the statute. The decisions established the CVRA violation as a finding of fact while leaving the underlying agreement in place.⁶

The victims' broader effort to overturn the agreement ultimately failed at the appellate level. In April 2021 the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, sitting en banc, ruled in Wild's case that the CVRA's protections did not attach before the government filed formal charges, and that because no federal charges had been filed against Epstein, the statute did not give the victims a remedy to set aside the pre-charge agreement. The ruling left the CVRA finding of a conferral failure intact while denying the victims the relief they had sought.⁶

DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility Report

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility released a report on November 12, 2020, examining the conduct of Acosta and his subordinates in the Epstein matter. The report concluded that Acosta exercised "poor judgment" in resolving the federal investigation through a state plea agreement, but it did not find professional misconduct, stating that his decision to decline federal prosecution was within the scope of his authority and that there was no evidence the decision was based on corruption or other impermissible considerations.²⁷

OPR located the "poor judgment" specifically in Acosta's failure to ensure that the state would notify the federally identified victims of Epstein's plea hearing, leaving victims uninformed about the proceeding that resolved an investigation about which the office had communicated with them for months. The report described the non-prosecution agreement as "a flawed mechanism for satisfying the federal interest" that had prompted the investigation, and it documented extensive concessions made to Epstein's lawyers.⁷

The report also recorded internal dissent. The line prosecutor Ann Marie Villafana had objected to the access granted to Epstein's defense counsel and to meeting with them, and was overruled by supervisors; a footnote recorded her belief that an email from her supervisor Matthew Menchel was meant to "put [her] in [her] place," while Menchel described her as having a history of resisting supervisory authority. OPR declined to refer Acosta or other prosecutors for disciplinary action on professional-responsibility grounds, a conclusion that victims' advocates characterized as a whitewash.⁷

Secretary of Labor and Resignation

President Donald Trump nominated Acosta as Secretary of Labor, and he was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in in April 2017, having previously chaired the National Labor Relations Board and served as dean of Florida International University's law school. The Florida agreement drew scrutiny during his 2017 confirmation but did not derail it.¹

After the November 2018 Miami Herald investigation "Perversion of Justice" by Julie K. Brown revived attention to the agreement, and after Epstein's July 2019 federal arrest in New York on new sex-trafficking charges, Acosta held a July 10, 2019, press conference defending his handling of the case, arguing that the state alternative had at least secured Epstein's registration as a sex offender and some jail time where the state had been prepared to offer less. He resigned on July 12, 2019, two days later, saying he did not want the controversy to distract from the administration's work and that it would be "selfish" to remain.¹⁸

In September 2025 Acosta appeared for a closed-door deposition before the House Oversight Committee as part of its renewed inquiry into the federal handling of the Epstein and Maxwell cases, testifying for roughly six hours; the committee released the transcript on October 17, 2025. Chairman James Comer said Acosta had cooperated, and the committee separately sought records and testimony from other former officials.⁹

Intelligence Claim

In a July 2019 article for The Daily Beast, journalist Vicky Ward reported that, according to an anonymous former senior White House official, Acosta had explained the lenient Epstein deal during his Labor Secretary vetting by saying he had been told that Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and to "leave it alone" because the matter was above his pay grade. Ward's report attributed the account to a single unnamed source, and commentators noted the source could not be independently confirmed. Ward had reported on Epstein for years and had earlier written a 2003 profile of him for Vanity Fair.¹⁰

Acosta disputed the characterization. Asked about the reporting at his July 2019 press conference, he said he would "hesitate to take this reporting as fact." Under oath to Justice Department investigators he answered "no" when asked whether he had knowledge of Epstein being an intelligence asset, and the OPR review reported that none of the subjects it interviewed believed Epstein to have been an intelligence asset.¹¹⁷

At his September 2025 House Oversight deposition, Acosta again denied the intelligence account. Asked whether anyone had told him Epstein could not be prosecuted because he was an asset, he said "No one approached me and said that," and he stated that if there had been classified or secure information bearing on the case, established procedures would have been triggered that were never triggered. The intelligence claim remains an attributed, disputed assertion sourced to a single anonymous account rather than an established finding.⁹¹¹