printThe lynch mob against Alex Acosta, Trump’s former labor secretary, is just that: a lynch mob. Jeffrey Epstein is the slimy sleazebag here, not Mr. Acosta.
I don’t usually agree with broadcaster Michael Medved, who leans heavily left. However, today, Mr. Medved did a bang-up job defending the rules of evidence. Or, what Joe Biden once denounced as Western jurisprudence.
The girls involved with Epstein did not wish to testify. And who can blame them?
And while “[t]he evidence in the original case appears overwhelming—in an interview with the Miami Herald the lead detective recounted phone records, flight logs and instructions for delivering flowers to one of Mr Epstein’s young fixations, alongside her high-school report card”—Epstein’s “original defense team included Alan Dershowitz and Kenn Starr, two lawyers skilled in defending the indefensible.” (The Economist.)
Epstein hired the best lawyers who were unmatched by the prosecution and the limits of the law.
“… his star-studded lawyers,” reports the Daily Beast, “threatened to go to trial in a case prosecutors feared was unwinnable, in part because Epstein’s team dredged up dirt on the victims, including social media posts indicating drug use.”
Dershowitz (who has defended President Trump with his usual legal élan), “told The Daily Beast that his accuser, Virginia Roberts, “has committed perjury and will continue to commit perjury in federal court.”
“I am asking the FBI to come to this trial because perjury will be committed in front of a federal judge and in a federal courtroom,” Dershowitz added. “And I will prove it is she who is committing perjury.”
Even the Economist concedes that it was not at all “obvious that the top federal prosecutor who negotiated the deal, Alexander Acosta, had better options available.”
“… [T]he difficulties of securing convictions in cases of rape or sexual abuse are well known.”
Alex Acosta, whose address to the public I found credible, had to ultimately defer to police and prosecutors in Palm Beach, Florida.