Republican Sen. James Lankford blamed the negative coverage Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta has received about the charges against Jeffrey Epstein on the fact that he is a member of President Trump’s cabinet.
Acosta was a part of a now-infamous plea deal that billionaire Jeffrey Epstein received back in 2008, which saw him plead guilty to two state-level prostitution charges, spend 13 months in jail, pay restitution to specific victims, and register as a sex offender. Epstein was charged earlier this week with sex trafficking and conspiring. The new charges have brought a heightened level of scrutiny to the original plea agreement.
“What I’m disappointed at is so much of the coverage in the last really 48 hours on every network has been about President Trump and Acosta as Labor Secretary,” Lankford stated in an interview with Wolf Blitzer. “We’ve not really spent a lot of time talking about the girls that were abused in the process and trafficked and about Epstein and what the horrific acts that he really did.”
Blitzer argued that Acosta at least owed an apology to Epstein’s victims because Acosta violated the law by not informing the victims of the plea agreement at the time it was reached.
“My impression is a lot of the push right now is because he’s a Trump Cabinet member and not because of the case,” he added. “My focus would be let’s focus on him as an attorney, not as a Cabinet member … and find out what mistakes were made and how do we never do this again and make sure there aren’t some other individuals in other places that we had a prosecution that was not fully fulfilled.”
He also said that Acosta should not resign, despite having faced those calls from Democratic officials.
