Attorney General Pam Bondi had nearly a decade to prosecute disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein during her tenure as Florida Attorney General between 2011 and 2019, but ultimately didn’t, a law professor told USA Today Saturday.
“The federal government and the state government, of course, are two different political entities, and both have the power to try the same person for the same crime, using their respective laws," said Robert Jarvis, Nova Southeastern University law professor. "Thus, Pam Bondi could have tried Epstein."
Epstein first faced legal trouble in 2006 when he was tried and convicted of one count of prostitution and sentenced to 18 months in prison. His sentence has been called “completely unprecedented” given that the FBI’s investigation found at least 40 potential minor victims, and that he was allowed to leave prison for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week for work release.
Epstein’s sentence was offered by then-federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta, who, when later asked about the lenient agreement, said that he had been told to “leave it alone” as Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” and that the matter was “above his pay grade.”
The non-prosecution agreement shut down an ongoing FBI probe into Epstein, as well as granted him and all named and unnamed potential co-conspirators immunity from federal charges. As Florida’s top law enforcement official just a few years later, however, Bondi had the ability to reopen the investigation, Jarvis said.
Bondi has been at the center of the latest development involving Epstein, alleged to have maintained a client list of powerful figures for blackmail purposes, for having signed off on a Justice Department memo concluding that Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on new human trafficking charges, died by suicide, and that he did not maintain a client list.
Some of Trump’s most loyal supporters have called for Bondi’s resignation, citing her contradicting claims early into Trump’s second term regarding Epstein. In February, she told Fox News that Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now,” despite several months later proclaiming that no client list ever existed.