As anyone who has ever watched Law & Order knows, in the criminal justice system, prosecutors enter into plea agreements with defendants for any number of reasons: to spare the victim the pain of testifying, to expedite punishment, to reduce the risk that a guilty person will be acquitted, etc. Better to secure a plea and some form of penalty than take the chance that the perp goes free and faces no repercussions at all.

That’s exactly what happened more than a decade ago when now-Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta was the U.S. Attorney in Miami, and his office reached a deal with billionaire sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.