Lawmakers and legal analysts were taken aback as former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta stumbled facing a withering congressional spotlight as he defended a 2008 plea deal that allowed convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to serve minimal jail time.
Acosta spoke to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, where he defended his "sweetheart plea deal" he offered to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Legal analyst Lisa Rubin pinpointed a specific exchange he had with Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), who hammered him about why he considered Epstein's victims unreliable.
Speaking to MSNBC on Monday, legal analyst Lisa Rubin and host Nicolle Wallace both took issue with Acosta's claim that "there were evidentiary issues" and problems with the witnesses in the Florida Epstein case, and that he couldn't win a prosecution.
Wallace described it as "the final slander of these women."
"The witnesses are victims of sexual assault from some of the most powerful men the planet has ever known," she noted.
Rubin described reading the transcript as like being in two different worlds.
"Because you had Alex Acosta on one hand, who was sort of representative of the old guard and the way people used to see sexual assault. And yet he was facing an onslaught of questions from women who came to Congress, having had very different life experiences and representative of a new generation," said Rubin.
Specifically, the questions from Crockett sent Acosta stumbling.
"Crockett, for example, who really wanted to drill down on, I'm sorry, what exactly were the credibility problems with these women? Why did you not find them credible? Why did you think you couldn't rehabilitate them in front of a jury? He sort of sputtered, and he also insisted at one point during the transcript that it wasn't a sweetheart deal after all. And his reasoning for saying that is because on his recommendation, the original non-prosecution agreement would have had Jeffrey Epstein do two years in jail, which he said was the sentence Jeffrey Epstein would have received had the state not been so crooked," Rubin said.
That ignores that a prosecutor under his supervision had written an 80-page memo saying that they could easily bring 50 to 60 counts against Epstein rather than a single state charge.
"So, I found the whole thing sort of galling as well as it was galling and useless, because, as you and I have discussed before, Alex Acosta was interviewed by the Department of Justice as part of an investigation they did into the professional misconduct of lawyers associated with the Epstein case," Rubin recalled.
Acosta "relied on that throughout his interview," Rubin continued. "He hugged it to him like a child has a stuffed animal, and he just kept going back to it. I don't have an independent recollection of this, but here's what the report says, and like quoting it chapter and verse as if it were his defense manual, as opposed to sort of having organic recollections of what had transpired. The whole thing to me was both disappointing, upsetting, and yet, not surprisingly, so."
The late Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's victims, killed herself after a long fight for some accountability for what happened to her and other Epstein accusers. Giuffre left behind a book to be published after her death that details specifics about the abuse she and others were subject to. The book is set to be released on Tuesday.
Tara Palmari, who worked with Giuffre to produce the "Broken" podcast, recalled visiting Epstein's housekeeper, who was tasked with setting up the massage tables and cleaning sex toys. She recalled that Giuffre felt relieved to have some of Epstein's staff willing to confirm her account. He testified in the Ghislaine Maxwell case.
