Martin Weinberg

Martin G. Weinberg is a Boston criminal defense and appellate lawyer, a 1971 graduate of Harvard Law School, who argued the Fourth Amendment case United States v. Chadwick before the Supreme Court in 1977. He represented Jeffrey Epstein at a December 2007 meeting with U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta on the Epstein non-prosecution agreement, moved in 2011 to intervene in his own name in the victims' suit Doe v. United States, filed Privacy Act and Freedom of Information Act requests with the FBI and the CIA for Epstein's records in 2010 and 2011, and appeared for Epstein in United States v. Epstein in 2019.¹²³

Career

Weinberg was admitted in Massachusetts in 1972. He was an associate at Crane, Inker & Oteri in Boston from 1972 to 1973 and a partner from 1973 to 1975, a partner of Oteri, Weinberg & Lawson from 1975 to 1997, and since 1997 has practiced as Martin G. Weinberg, P.C., at 20 Park Plaza in Boston. He argued Chadwick on April 26, 1977, and in 2010 challenged the Justice Department's use of the Stored Communications Act to seize the content of emails in United States v. Warshak. His firm describes his clients as including "prominent trial attorneys, public officials, union leaders, corporate executives, health care executives, and internet pioneers," on charges ranging from health care fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and political corruption to RICO and "internet sex offenses." He is a former director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, co-chair of its Lawyers' Assistance Strike Force, and received its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022.¹

The Non-Prosecution Agreement

After the agreement was signed on September 24, 2007, Epstein's lawyers sought to renegotiate it and to have it set aside in Washington. On December 14, 2007 Weinberg, Kenneth Starr, Alan Dershowitz and Gerald Lefcourt met Acosta in Miami; three days later Starr and Jay Lefkowitz sent Acosta a 110-page letter invoking the Palm Beach State Attorney's view that Epstein should not have to register as a sex offender.³⁴

On June 30, 2009, during Epstein's work release from the Palm Beach County jail, Epstein wrote to Weinberg: "when is a good time to speak." Weinberg answered "noon?" and Epstein replied "great."⁵

On April 7, 2011, after the petitioners in Doe v. United States moved to use the plea correspondence between prosecutors and defense counsel as evidence and to unseal it, Weinberg, Roy Black and Lefkowitz moved to intervene in their own names. Epstein moved for limited intervention on September 2, 2011.⁶

The FBI and CIA Requests

In July 2011 Epstein, through Weinberg, had requests pending with both the FBI and the CIA for the records the agencies held on him. On July 18, 2011 Weinberg's assistant reported that the CIA's FOIA office had said it had no standard privacy waiver form and that the Justice Department's form would suffice. Epstein asked: "did we fill out one for the fbi foia? did we not send anything yet to cia?" Weinberg replied: "yes, we filled out fbi privacy waiver with VI address last year, we filed CIA FOIA - they have it - we need a separate privacy waiver signed in 2011 for them to fully process, we can fill it out based on fbi one, pdf to you for signature and return." The FBI Privacy Waiver and Certification of Identity gave Epstein's address as St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, with a prior address at 358 El Brillo Way, Palm Beach, and authorized release of the records to Weinberg.⁷

United States v. Epstein

After Epstein's arrest on July 6, 2019, Weinberg appeared with Reid Weingarten and Marc Fernich before Judge Richard M. Berman. The government reported that the safe in Epstein's Manhattan townhouse held an expired foreign passport bearing his photograph and another name, with stamps showing entries to France, Spain, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. Fernich, Weinberg and Weingarten replied on July 18, 2019 that "Epstein was given the passport at issue by a friend," that "some Jewish-Americans were informally advised at the time to carry identification bearing a non-Jewish name when traveling internationally in case of hijacking," and that the stamps "predating his receipt of the document, do not reflect Mr. Epstein's entries or exits."⁸

Epstein was found dead in the Metropolitan Correctional Center on August 10, 2019. At the public hearing on the government's application for an order of nolle prosequi on August 27, 2019, Weingarten and Weinberg appeared for the defense opposite Assistant U.S. Attorneys Maurene Comey and Alison Moe; Berman signed the order on August 29.⁹