Alexander Acosta

Alexander Acosta (born January 16, 1969) is an American lawyer who served as United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida from 2005 to 2009 and as United States Secretary of Labor from 2017 to 2019. As US Attorney he supervised the office that negotiated the 2008 non-prosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein, an arrangement under which Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges in Florida, served a 13-month jail term with work release, and obtained federal immunity for himself and named co-conspirators. A federal judge later ruled that prosecutors violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by concealing the deal from victims, and Acosta resigned as Secretary of Labor in July 2019 amid renewed scrutiny of the agreement.¹²

Early Career and Kirkland & Ellis

Acosta was born in Miami to Cuban refugee parents and received his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University, graduating from Harvard Law School in 1994. He clerked for Judge Samuel Alito on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and then practiced as an associate in the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis, specializing in employment and labor law. He served as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division from 2001 to 2002, as a member of the National Labor Relations Board from December 2002 to August 2003, and as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights from August 2003 to June 2005, all under President George W. Bush, who then appointed him U.S. Attorney in Miami.³⁴

As U.S. Attorney he oversaw the 2006 prosecution of the Cali Drug Cartel leaders Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, who pleaded guilty on September 26, 2006 and received thirty-year sentences; under the plea agreements 28 relatives gave up their interests in the family's businesses and the government agreed not to prosecute six of them.⁵

The 2008 Non-Prosecution Agreement

Federal investigators in the Southern District of Florida identified roughly 30, and ultimately more than 30, minors whom Epstein was alleged to have sexually abused, after the Palm Beach Police Department referred the case to the FBI on concerns that the local prosecution would be too lenient. By May 2007 government lawyers had prepared an 82-page prosecution memorandum and a 53-page draft federal indictment charging Epstein with multiple federal sex offenses; the Justice Department later described the draft as a 60-count indictment. Acosta decided in 2007 to negotiate with Epstein's defense team rather than seek that indictment. At a July 31, 2007 meeting with Epstein's lawyers, his office offered to end the investigation if Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges, served at least two years, registered as a sex offender, and agreed to a damages mechanism for victims. Acosta did not sign the agreement but, according to the Justice Department's later review, "participated in its drafting and approved it, with knowledge of its terms."¹⁶⁷

The non-prosecution agreement, negotiated through 2007 and executed in stages, required Epstein to plead guilty in Palm Beach County court, which he did in June 2008, to state charges including soliciting prostitution and procuring a person under 18 for prostitution. He was sentenced to 18 months, of which he served roughly 13, under conditions that allowed extensive work release. The Justice Department's review recorded that from October 2008 he spent "12 hours a day purportedly working at the 'Florida Science Foundation,' an entity Epstein had recently incorporated that was co-located at the West Palm Beach office of one of Epstein's attorneys"; later reporting on sheriff's records described him leaving the jail for up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. The foundation paid the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office 128,136 dollars during his incarceration. Epstein's defense team included high-profile lawyers such as Alan Dershowitz, Kenneth Starr, and Roy Black, who pressed the office for concessions.^1678910

The agreement extended immunity from federal prosecution to Epstein, to four named co-conspirators, and to unnamed "potential co-conspirators," language read as shielding others who helped recruit or conceal the abuse. The terms were not disclosed to the identified victims while the deal was being finalized, and the agreement was sealed. The breadth of the immunity provisions, the sealing, and the leniency of the sentence became the basis for years of subsequent litigation and official review. The attorney Bradley Edwards, representing victims, led the legal challenge to the agreement.¹¹¹

The Negotiators and the Breakfast

Epstein's lead negotiator was Jay Lefkowitz, a litigation partner at Kirkland & Ellis, Acosta's former firm, and a former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. On August 19, 2005 Bush had named Lefkowitz the first Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, a part-time post he held while practicing law in New York until January 2009, so that he represented Epstein in 2007 and 2008 while serving in the administration that had appointed Acosta. Starr was also a Kirkland & Ellis partner.¹²¹³

The agreement's terms were settled in September 2007 in email between Lefkowitz and the line prosecutor, A. Marie Villafaña. On September 21, three days before signing, Palm Beach State Attorney Barry Krischer wrote to her: "Glad we could get this worked out for reasons I won't put in writing." On September 24, as the agreement was executed, Lefkowitz asked her to "do whatever you can to keep this from becoming public," and she reported that she had forwarded his message "only to [United States Attorney] Alex, Andy, and Roland."¹⁴

On October 10, 2007 Lefkowitz wrote to Acosta that "[n]either federal agents nor anyone from your Office should contact the identified individuals." Acosta then met him for breakfast, and Lefkowitz's follow-up letter thanked Acosta "for the commitment you made to me during our October 12 meeting in which you . . . assured me that your Office would not . . . contact any of the identified individuals, potential witnesses, or potential civil claimants." The breakfast followed the September 24 signing, and the Justice Department's later review found no evidence that it "led to the NPA, which had been signed weeks earlier, or to any other significant decision that benefited Epstein."⁷¹⁴

On November 30, 2007 Acosta wrote to Starr: "I am directing our prosecutors not to issue victim notification letters until this Friday at 5 p.m., to provide you with time to review these options with your client." On December 19, 2007 he wrote to the defense lawyer Lilly Ann Sanchez that his office would provide notice of the federal resolution but would "defer to the discretion of the State Attorney regarding whether he wishes to provide victims with notices of the state proceedings." Epstein's lawyers then spent six months seeking review from the Criminal Division and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, which declined to intervene on June 23, 2008.⁷¹⁴

In a 2011 letter defending the agreement, Acosta wrote that Epstein's team had waged "a year-long assault on the prosecution and the prosecutors," that "[d]efense counsel investigated individual prosecutors and their families," and that they would "obtain concessions as part of a negotiation and agree to proceed, only to change their minds, and appeal the office's position to Washington."⁸

On his retirement from Kirkland & Ellis in March 2026, Lefkowitz said: "Although I believe everyone is entitled to representation no matter how heinous their crimes, knowing what we all know now, I would not have taken on the Epstein matter." A Kirkland spokesperson said: "To say the least, we deeply regret the firm's 2007 representation of Jeffrey Epstein."¹⁵

The Prosecutors' Chronology

A 51-page "Epstein Investigation Timeline," marked privileged and as containing grand jury material and stamped Exhibit A-1, logs Acosta's part in the negotiation document by document. In the summer of 2007 Criminal Division chief Matthew Menchel announced to the case team that Acosta would offer a two-year state plea, and in August the office told the defense that two years of incarceration was a non-negotiable minimum, that Acosta was not inclined to meet Epstein's counsel, and that Epstein had until August 17 to decide. In September 2007 Acosta, Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, First Assistant Jeffrey Sloman, Villafaña and John McMillan met Starr, Lefkowitz and Lilly Ann Sanchez, and on September 11 a draft agreement incorporating Acosta's edits went to Gerald Lefcourt. On September 23 Acosta told Lefkowitz to deal directly with Andrew Lourie and Villafaña, and on September 24 he sent his final edits before the signing.¹⁶

After the signing the chronology records a November 30, 2007 letter from Acosta to Starr asking for a statement signed by Epstein that he would abide by every term by December 14 or the office would proceed with prosecution, a companion letter saying the office stood ready to unwind the agreement if Epstein was dissatisfied with it, and a December 14, 2007 draft letter from Acosta to Krischer about Epstein registering as a sex offender. In early January 2008, according to the chronology, Lefkowitz admitted to Acosta in a telephone call that he had never intended Epstein to plead guilty to an offense requiring sex offender registration. After the Criminal Division rejected Epstein's appeal in May 2008, Villafaña asked to indict, and Sloman and Acosta advised that Epstein would be given the chance to perform. On May 16, 2008 Sloman told Villafaña, "We got approved," adding: "Alex called to tell me. He said the ltr needs to be tweaked which we'll do on Monday. I wouldn't call the FBI yet."¹⁶¹⁷

The Office of Professional Responsibility recorded two recusal questions. In May 2008 the office's Professional Responsibility Officer asked the Department whether Acosta should step aside because he was considering a visiting professorship at Harvard Law School in 2009 while Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor, was representing Epstein "as a private, paying client"; the Department advised that there was no basis for recusal. In late 2008, "when Acosta anticipated leaving the USAO and was considering pursuing employment with Kirkland & Ellis," he told Sloman to stop copying him on Epstein emails, and the Department approved his recusal because he had "begun to discuss possible employment" with the firm that represented Epstein.¹⁸

Crime Victims' Rights Act Ruling

In the case styled Doe v. United States, No. 08-80736, brought by victims including Courtney Wild and Jane Doe 2 to enforce their rights, United States District Judge Kenneth Marra ruled on February 21, 2019, that the government had violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by failing to confer with the victims before entering the non-prosecution agreement. The opinion recorded that "[w]hile the Government spent untold hours negotiating the terms and implications of the NPA with Epstein's attorneys, scant information was shared with victims," and that "[t]he Court is not ruling that the decision not to prosecute was improper." After the ruling the Justice Department recused Acosta's former office from the litigation and assigned the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia to defend it. Marra wrote that "particularly problematic was the government's decision to conceal the existence of the" agreement and to "mislead the victims to believe that federal prosecution was still a possibility," finding that prosecutors had counseled the victims to have "patience" after the deal had been signed.⁷¹⁴

In a later ruling on September 16, 2019, Marra declined to invalidate the non-prosecution agreement itself, noting that Epstein had died and that rescission would not restore the victims' position, and he held that the victims were not entitled to monetary damages from the government under the statute. He refused the victims' request to order Acosta to meet with them, writing: "The Court has no jurisdiction over Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. Attorney, who is now a private citizen." The decisions established the CVRA violation as a finding of fact while leaving the underlying agreement in place.¹⁹²⁰

The victims' broader effort to overturn the agreement ultimately failed at the appellate level. In its brief to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the Justice Department argued that "the legal obligations under the CVRA do not attach prior to the government charging a case," while conceding at oral argument that the office had "made a mistake in causing her to believe that the case was ongoing when in fact the NPA had been signed." A three-judge panel adopted the government's position in April 2020, holding that CVRA rights do not attach before charges, but the full court vacated that opinion in August 2020. On April 15, 2021 the en banc court denied Wild's petition by seven votes to four on a narrower ground: the Act does not authorize a victim to seek judicial enforcement of her rights in a freestanding civil action when no charges have been filed. The majority stated that it "needn't decide" whether the rights to confer and to fair treatment attach before charges, and the dissenting judges faulted it for that omission. The ruling left the district court's finding of a conferral violation undisturbed while denying the victims any remedy, and the Supreme Court of the United States denied certiorari on February 22, 2022.⁷²¹²²

DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility Report

The review originated in a December 3, 2018 letter from Senator Ben Sasse, chairman of a Senate Judiciary oversight subcommittee, citing the Miami Herald series; OPR opened its investigation on February 6, 2019. It recorded that a victims' attorney had raised allegations of improper influence in December 2010 and that OPR had declined to open an inquiry then in deference to the pending litigation. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility released a report on November 12, 2020, examining the conduct of Acosta and his subordinates in the Epstein matter. The report concluded that Acosta exercised "poor judgment" in resolving the federal investigation through a state plea agreement, but it did not find professional misconduct, stating that his decision to decline federal prosecution was within the scope of his authority and that there was no evidence the decision was based on corruption or other impermissible considerations.²⁷

OPR located the "poor judgment" specifically in Acosta's failure to ensure that the state would notify the federally identified victims of Epstein's plea hearing, leaving victims uninformed about the proceeding that resolved an investigation about which the office had communicated with them for months. The report described the non-prosecution agreement as "a flawed mechanism for satisfying the federal interest" that had prompted the investigation, and it documented extensive concessions made to Epstein's lawyers. OPR found that Acosta's "application of federalism principles was too expansive, his view of the federal interest in prosecuting Epstein was too narrow, and his understanding of the state system was too imperfect to justify the decision to use the NPA," and that the three other supervisory subjects "left the USAO, were transitioning to other jobs, or were absent at critical junctures." It also concluded that the government's handling "gave victims and the public the misimpression that the government had colluded with Epstein's counsel to keep the NPA secret from the victims."⁷ Before the report was final, the chief of the Public Corruption Unit of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York reviewed the draft and on August 21, 2020 asked for two wording changes, which OPR accepted: "at least one victim known to be a minor" became "at least one victim believed to be a minor," described as "more accurately reflect[ing] our position in the bail arguments regarding Epstein," and a statement that investigators "were aware" Epstein used hidden cameras in his New York residence became that they "had learned" it.²³

The report also recorded internal dissent. The line prosecutor Ann Marie Villafana had objected to the access granted to Epstein's defense counsel and to meeting with them, and was overruled by supervisors; a footnote recorded her belief that an email from her supervisor Matthew Menchel was meant to "put [her] in [her] place," while Menchel described her as having a history of resisting supervisory authority. OPR declined to refer Acosta or other prosecutors for disciplinary action on professional-responsibility grounds, a conclusion that victims' advocates characterized as a whitewash.²⁴

One of those supervisors was Matthew Menchel, chief of the office's Criminal Division, who left in August 2007, weeks before the agreement was signed, for the law firm Kobre & Kim. According to reporting on the full OPR report, Menchel had offered the 2007 plea terms to an Epstein lawyer he had formerly dated. Epstein estate records released by the House Oversight Committee in October 2025 show appointments, telephone calls, and dinners between Menchel and Epstein in 2011, 2013, and 2017. Menchel has said he had no business relationship with Epstein "at any point, not before, during or after my tenure," and has denied skiing with him, but did not deny meeting him after leaving the office.²⁵

Secretary of Labor and Resignation

President Donald Trump nominated Acosta as Secretary of Labor, and he was confirmed by the Senate on April 17, 2017 and sworn in that month, having previously chaired the National Labor Relations Board and served as dean of Florida International University's law school. The Florida agreement drew scrutiny during his 2017 confirmation but did not derail it; OPR recorded that at his March 2017 hearing he was "questioned only briefly about the Epstein case."¹⁷

After the November 2018 Miami Herald investigation "Perversion of Justice" by Julie K. Brown revived attention to the agreement, and after Epstein's July 2019 federal arrest in New York on new sex-trafficking charges, Acosta held a July 10, 2019, press conference defending his handling of the case, arguing that the state alternative had at least secured Epstein's registration as a sex offender and some jail time, and saying that the Palm Beach State Attorney's Office "was ready to allow Epstein to walk free with no jail time, nothing." Krischer answered the same day that Acosta's "recollection of the matter is completely wrong" and that "Mr. Acosta should not be allowed to rewrite history." He resigned on July 12, 2019, two days later, saying he did not want the controversy to distract from the administration's work and that it would be "selfish" to remain.¹²⁶²⁷

On September 19, 2025 Acosta sat for a voluntary transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee as part of its renewed inquiry into the federal handling of the Epstein and Maxwell cases; the committee released the transcript on October 17, 2025, together with Epstein estate records. Chairman James Comer said Acosta had cooperated, and the committee separately sought records and testimony from other former officials. Acosta told the committee that prosecutors had avoided trial partly because some underage victims did not want to testify and a conviction was not assured, and he said he did not recall reading Villafaña's recommendation of a 60-count indictment. Lawmakers questioned him about the records of Menchel's later contacts with Epstein and about a photograph said to show the two skiing, which was not produced.²⁵²⁸

Intelligence Claim

In a July 2019 article for The Daily Beast, journalist Vicky Ward reported that, according to an anonymous former senior White House official, Acosta had explained the lenient Epstein deal during his Labor Secretary vetting by saying he had been told that Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and to "leave it alone" because the matter was above his pay grade. Ward's report attributed the account to a single unnamed source, and commentators noted the source could not be independently confirmed. Ward had reported on Epstein for years and had earlier written a 2003 profile of him for Vanity Fair.²⁹³⁰

Acosta disputed the characterization. Asked about the reporting at his July 2019 press conference, he said he would "hesitate to take this reporting as fact." Under oath to Justice Department investigators he answered "no" when asked whether he had knowledge of Epstein being an intelligence asset, and the OPR review reported that none of the subjects it interviewed believed Epstein to have been an intelligence asset.³¹³²

At his September 19, 2025 transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee, Acosta again denied the intelligence account. Asked whether anyone had told him Epstein could not be prosecuted because he was an asset, he said "No one approached me and said that," and he stated that if there had been classified or secure information bearing on the case, established procedures would have been triggered that were never triggered. The intelligence claim remains an attributed, disputed assertion sourced to a single anonymous account rather than an established finding.²⁸³¹

William Barr, Attorney General at the time of Epstein's 2019 arrest and death, was asked about the account in an August 18, 2025 deposition before the same committee. Asked whether he was aware of Acosta saying he had been told Epstein "belongs to intelligence and to leave it alone," Barr answered: "No. Other than what's ever been reported in articles over the years." He said he had "no reason to believe he was working for the CIA or any intelligence agency, and I'm dubious about claims like that," offered the supposition that Epstein might, "like many other businessmen," have talked to intelligence officers who debrief well-connected people, and said that "if he was an American asset, as opposed to some businessman who shares stuff with the government, I would've heard about it from the intelligence agency."³³