Attorney General William Barr won’t recuse himself from overseeing the prosecution of alleged child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in the Southern District of New York, said to a Justice Department official who spoke with the Washington Examiner today.
That reverses the position that Barr took Monday with reporters.
“I’m recused from that matter because one of the law firms that represented Epstein long ago was a firm that I subsequently joined for a period of time,” Barr told reporters Monday.
The Justice Department official said that Barr had consulted with career ethics officials at the department and would continue to handle the ongoing Epstein case. Barr would remain recused from any investigation into the Justice Department’s prior handling of Epstein’s case in the Southern District of Florida.
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility announced in February that it had opened an investigation into allegations that department attorneys may have committed professional misconduct in how Epstein’s criminal charges were resolved. Barr has recused himself from that retrospective investigation.
That internal inquiry is likely focusing on current Labor Secretary and former U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, who reached an agreement in 2008 with Epstein’s attorneys where Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to two state-level prostitution solicitation charges related to a 17-year-old girl. Epstein served just 13 months in a Palm Beach County jail, paid restitution to certain victims, and registered as a sex offender. The agreement was reportedly struck before investigators had even finished interviewing all the alleged victims.
The deal was kept quiet for more than a year, and Epstein’s alleged victims didn’t learn of it until he was out of jail.
In 2008, Epstein was represented by a legal team that included Kirkland & Ellis’s Jay Lefkowitz, as well as former independent counsel Ken Starr, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, as well as Roy Black, Gerald Lefcourt, and former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis.
Thousands of pages of records related to that deal were recently ordered by a federal court to be unsealed, which will likely happen in the coming weeks.
Yesterday’s 14-page indictment, handed down by the Southern District of New York, alleges that Epstein “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations” between 2002 and 2005 and perhaps beyond. Epstein pleaded not guilty in federal court Monday afternoon.
During Barr’s confirmation hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska voiced his frustration with the 2008 “sweetheart deal” that registered sex offender Epstein received from the Justice Department and asked for the internal investigation.
Barr said at the time that he might need to recuse himself from any Epstein-related issues.
