[Hot Air] U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth Marra said Thursday that prosecutors violated the Crime Victims Rights Act by failing to notify victims before signing off on the arrangement, under which federal prosecutors promised not to prosecute Epstein in federal court if he pleaded guilty to a pair of prostitution-related offenses in a Florida state court."Petitioners and the other victims should have been notified of the Government’s intention to take that course of action before it bound itself under the NPA," or nonprosecution agreement, Marra wrote.
Marra criticized federal prosecutors for not only hiding the agreement from the victims but also misleading them about the state of the case.
"Particularly problematic was the Government’s decision to conceal the existence of the NPA and mislead the victims to believe that federal prosecution was still a possibility," the judge wrote.
There’s a current political angle to this story which is that the man who made this disastrous agreement with Epstein’s attorneys is Trump’s Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta. So maybe there’s a reason some on the left are suddenly interested in this after years of not caring. But as I’ve said before: Who cares? What matters here is that there’s no way to justify this garbage agreement except as a gift to a billionaire who paid dozens of teen girls for sexual massages (and more in some cases). At the time the agreement was made, there were already more than 50 victims and it was clear more could be found in time some of them just 14-years-old. From the Miami Herald, here’s the slap on the wrist that Epstein’s dream team of lawyers worked out with Acosta: