'What's going on?' Pro-Trump insider baffled by White House response to Epstein survivors
One of President Donald Trump's allies struggled to make sense of the White House response to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
David Urban, a former senior advisor to Trump's 2016 campaign, appeared Thursday morning on "CNN News Central" where he was asked to comment on the president dismissing direct pleas from Epstein survivors to release the Department of Justice's investigative files on the late financier's sex trafficking network.
"I don't quite understand what's going on with this whole with this, with this situation," Urban said. "Look, I've always been for radical transparency. I stand with all the other folks that want to see everything disclosed that can be disclosed without harming victims anymore."
"I think the big question here, and I've asked this repeatedly and I'm not quite sure why the House [of Representatives] isn't doing this, but the question here is the non-prosecution agreement, which was which was agreed to in 2008, which kept Jeffrey Epstein out of federal prison and federal prosecution," Urban added. "He pled guilty to some state charges, which are much lesser, and served in a, you know, a county jail rather than federal prison."
The conservative commentator offered some questions and potential witnesses for Congress to examine.
"Why aren't those career prosecutors, why haven't they been asked to testify and explain their rationale behind that non-prosecution agreement?" Urban said. "Why haven't we heard from the former U.S. attorney there, Alex Acosta, on this issue? I think that's the really the nub of this of this crisis. We can get to the answers, I think, look, I think making more documents available is not really going to get anything. It's hard to prove or disprove a negative."
Urban singled out Acosta, the former Trump labor secretary who was the U.S. attorney in South Florida who reached the plea agreement with Epstein, as a witness who could shed more light on the matter.
"I don't know if there's any smoking guns there, but I do think one of the things that everyone is really missing here is, why aren't we talking to the people who cut the deal in 2008 to to set this gentleman on a path that was not appropriate?" Urban said. "He should have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law. He wasn't, and the question is why not, and I think those people are best-suited to be able to answer that question, yet we haven't heard from them."
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