President Trump on Tuesday defended Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who is under fire for his role in negotiating a lenient plea deal in 2008 for sex offender and wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump called Acosta “excellent” and said Acosta has done a “fantastic job,” and he feels “very badly” that Acosta has been caught up in the controversy.
Epstein faces new charges, including allegedly “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, according to a 14-page federal indictment. Epstein pleaded not guilty in federal court Monday.
“I feel very badly for Secretary Acosta, because I’ve known him as being somebody who works so hard and has done such a good job I feel very badly about that whole situation,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “But we’re going to be looking at that and looking at it very closely.”
[Related: Trump claims he was ‘not a fan’ of Jeffrey Epstein]
Pointing to the strong economy and low unemployment, Trump said that Acosta has been “just an excellent Secretary of Labor … He’s done a fantastic job.”
Acosta, the former U.S. attorney for Southern Florida, 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.
“Whether it’s a U.S. attorney or an assistant U.S. attorney or a judge, if you go back 12 years ago or 15 years ago and look at their past decisions, I would think you would probably find that they wish they did it a different way,” Trump said.
Trump also said that Acosta was not the only person at the Justice Department involved with securing what many have called a “sweetheart deal” for Epstein.
“I do hear that there were a lot of people involved in that decision. Not just him,” Trump said. “It was a decision I made, I think, not by him, but by a lot of people.”
And Trump said that he’d look into the decision-making behind the DOJ’s controversial Epstein deal: “We’ll have to look at and look at it very carefully … We’re going to look into it very carefully.”
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 past criminal charges were resolved. Attorney General William Barr has recused himself from that retrospective investigation.
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.
Kellyanne Conway also defended Acosta at the White House this morning. “[President Trump] met Alex Acosta when Alex applied and got the job, where he’s doing a great job. You look at the economy,” Conway told reporters. “It’s classic [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] and her Democratic Party to not focus on the perpetrator at hand and instead to focus on a member of the Trump administration.”
“They’re so obsessed with this president that they immediately go to Alex Acosta,” Conway said.
Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats have called on Acosta to resign following Epstein’s arrest.
