Thread by @DavidPepper

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Sweetheart Deal of the Century

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@NOTUSreports clued me into a story the other day that bears amplifying.

It really is a stunning revelation: the sweetheart plea deal with Jeffrey Epstein,

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reached by then U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, that Ghislaine Maxwell hopes will set her free (via her current Supreme Court petition), isn’t just of great interest to her.

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That plea agreement years ago actually included an eye-popping additional clause—that the “United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein.”

Here it is:

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And as you see even in the second half of that excerpt, Maxwell is arguing that as one of the co-conspirators (yes, she’s admitting it even as the far right starts acting as if she’s a victim), she is protected by this agreement.

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Whether or not that is the case comes down to the question of whether a plea deal in one district (Southern District of Florida) binds other US Attorney’s Offices around the country to honor that agreement.

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As Pagliery writes, the worst case scenario from this case would be that the Court reads the law in a way that “could render void any damning revelations in the so-called ‘Epstein files’ by granting blanket immunity to any child abusing associates of the dead billionaire.”

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So even if there is some list of co-conspirators that comes out, they may already have their get out of jail free card.

But regardless of whether the Court takes the case, and how it rules, this part of the sketchy deal begs some obvious questions:

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(**the deal was already considered bizarrely beneficial to Epstein himself because, rather than facing up to life in prison on federal sex trafficking charges, he only had to plead guilty to 2 state charges of solicitation of prostitution, leading to 13 months in county jail)

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1) when Epstein already got off so easy, why would the U.S. Attorney in Southern Florida also have agreed not to prosecute four other co-conspirators in exchange for Epstein’s plea?

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2) why in the world would he also make an outrageously open-ended agreement not to prosecute all “potential”Epstein co-conspirators that arose then or in the future?

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3) and, of all the people he could have chosen, why would Donald Trump handpick the very U.S. Attorney who negotiated such a scandalously sweetheart deal—which benefited not just Epstein, but anyone who might be worried

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that they may be considered a “potential” Epstein co-conspirator then or in the future—to become his first Secretary of Labor ? (Note that anyone in South Florida would be on even firmer ground than Maxwell arguing that the agreement protected them).

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That’s a lot of hmmmms, isn’t it?

Thank you NOTUS for your reporting.

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