Friday, July 10, 2020
This Reporter Exposed Epstein & Enablers, Getting The FBI Back Into Action
Posted by Peter Quennell
1. Constraints Of The US System
Back in 2007 the FBI found their hands tied on this case - and it was Julie Brown, a Miami reporter, who got them back in the game again.
In general we’ve been warmish toward the FBI because of its major co-operation with the Italian counterparts.
Italian agents work at FBI HQ and Quantico and American agents are embedded in Italian law enforcement. We get occasional tips from both parties.
But the FBI has it less easy than the Carabinieri and Italian law enforcement generally.
The “wonderful” American political/legal system that is so much revered is really tailor-made for inefficiency, corruption, and disruption.
The FBI has to contend with the peculiarly American problem of the thousands upon thousands of ideological political appointees completely dominating the top layers of government (and costing US taxpayers many billions).
They are by far the biggest cause of legal disruptions, not least in Meredith’s case.
As we are seeing in the American news right now, urban areas, districts, counties, states, and the federal government have very ill defined legal boundaries. Tailor made for gaming.
Those thousands of political appointees make sure that hundreds and even thousands of legal cases fall through the cracks every year.
Contrast all this with Italy’s implacable fight against top-level corruption.
2. The FBI Found Its Hands Tied
The FBI was first invited in to the Epstein case by Florida prosecutors in 2006. They initiated “Operation Leap Year” leading to a 53-page indictment. What happened next, from Wikipedia:
Alexander Acosta, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, agreed to a plea deal, which Alan Dershowitz helped to negotiate, to grant immunity from all federal criminal charges to Epstein, along with four named co-conspirators and any unnamed “potential co-conspirators”.
According to the Miami Herald, the non-prosecution agreement “essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes”. At the time, this halted the investigation and sealed the indictment. The Miami Herald said: “Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims.”
Acosta later said he offered a lenient plea deal because he was told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence”, was “above his pay grade” and to “leave it alone”. Epstein agreed to plead guilty in Florida state court to two felony prostitution charges, register as a sex offender, and pay restitution to three dozen victims identified by the FBI. The plea deal was later described as a “sweetheart deal”.
For the next decade that was pretty well “it” for the FBI and there seemed no way forward for them.
But now, thanks to the implacable Julie Harris, they are roaring back with a vengeance.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 07/10/20 at 11:37 AM in
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