Alexander Acosta
Rene Alexander Acosta is an American attorney and politician. A member of the Republican Party, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to the National Labor Relations Board, and later served as the assistant attorney general for civil rights and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. He is a former dean of Florida International University College of Law.
In 2005, police in Palm Beach, Florida, began investigating Jeffrey Epstein after a parent reported that he had sexually abused her 14-year-old daughter. In 2008, Acosta approved a controversial plea deal granting immunity from all federal criminal charges to Epstein.
As part of the plea deal, Epstein served 13 months in a minimum-security county jail. He was also allowed to leave the facility up to 12 hours a day.
From 2017 to 2019, Alexander Acosta served as the 27th United States secretary of labor. President Donald Trump nominated Acosta to be Labor Secretary on, and he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on.
After Epstein's arrest in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges, Acosta faced criticism for his role in the 2008 non-prosecution agreement. He resigned from the Trump administration on July 19 and was replaced by Eugene Scalia.
Since March of 2025, Acosta has been a member of the board of directors of Newsmax and serves as its Audit Committee chair.
Early life
Acosta is the only son of Cuban immigrants. He is a native of Miami, Florida, where he attended the Gulliver Schools. Acosta received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Harvard College in 1990, and received a Juris Doctor degree cum laude from Harvard Law School 1994. He is the first member of his family to graduate from college.Early career (1994–2001)
Following law school, Acosta served as a law clerk to Samuel Alito, then a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, from 1994 to 1995. Acosta then worked at the office of the law firm Kirkland & Ellis in Washington, D.C., where he specialized in employment and labor issues. While in Washington, Acosta taught classes on employment law, disability-based discrimination law, and civil rights law at the George Mason University School of Law.Acosta was a member of the Board of Trustees of Gulliver Schools, where he served a past term as board chairman.
George W. Bush administration (2001–2005)
Acosta served in four presidentially appointed, U.S. Senate-confirmed positions in the George W. Bush administration. From December 2001 to December 2002, he served as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.From December 2002 to August 2003, he was a member of the National Labor Relations Board for which he participated in or authored more than 125 opinions.
Then, he became Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division on August 22, 2003, where he was known for increasing federal prosecutions against human trafficking. Acosta authorized Federal intervention in an Oklahoma religious liberties case to help assure the right to wear hijab in public school, and worked with Mississippi authorities to reopen the investigation of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth whose abduction and murder helped spark the civil rights movement. He was the first Hispanic to serve as Assistant Attorney General.
While leading the Civil Rights Division, Acosta allowed his predecessor, Bradley Schlozman, to continue to make decisions on hiring. A report by the inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility later found that Schlozman illegally gave preferential treatment to conservatives and made false statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Those findings were relayed to the office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, but Schlozman was not prosecuted. While it put the primary responsibility on Schlozman, the report also concluded that Acosta "did not sufficiently supervise Schlozman" and that "in light of indications had about Schlozman's conduct and judgment, they failed to ensure that Schlozman's hiring and personnel decisions were based on proper considerations."
U.S. attorney for Southern District of Florida (2005–2009)
In 2005, Acosta was appointed as the U.S. attorney for Southern District of Florida, where his office successfully prosecuted the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the terrorism suspect José Padilla, the founders of the Cali Cartel, and Charles McArther Emmanuel, the son of Liberia's former leader.The district also targeted white collar crime, prosecuting several bank-related cases, including one against Swiss bank UBS. The case resulted in UBS paying $780 million in fines, and for the first time in history, the bank provided the United States with the names of individuals who were using secret Swiss bank accounts to avoid U.S. federal income taxes.
Other notable cases during his tenure include the corruption prosecution of Palm Beach County Commission chairman Tony Masilotti, Palm Beach County commissioner Warren Newell, Palm Beach County commissioner Mary McCarty, and Broward sheriff Ken Jenne; the conviction of Cali Cartel founders Miguel and Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, for the importation of 200,000 kilos of cocaine, which resulted in a $2.1 billion forfeiture; and the white-collar crime prosecutions of executives connected to Hamilton Bank.
Acosta also emphasized health care fraud prosecutions. Under Acosta's leadership the district prosecuted more than 700 individuals, responsible for a total of more than $2 billion in Medicare fraud.
Jeffrey Epstein case
In August 2007, Acosta's office entered into negotiations with Jeffrey Epstein about a plea agreement. On September 24, 2007, Epstein signed a non-prosecution agreement, a day before the prosecutor in the case was prepared to indict him. Over the subsequent months, Epstein sought to negotiate the terms of the agreement and pressured Acosta to remove Marie Villafaña, the prosecutor on the case. In 2008, as U.S. attorney, Acosta approved a federal non-prosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein. This secret agreement would later be unsuccessfully challenged in court for violating the Crime Victims' Rights Act as well as be cited as a defense in the case of Ghislaine Maxwell.Renewed interest
In 2017, Acosta was nominated for Secretary of Labor by Donald Trump. His handling of the Epstein case was discussed as part of his confirmation hearing.On November 28, 2018, as rumors circulated that Acosta was being considered as a possible successor to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Miami Herald published an investigation detailing Acosta's role in the Epstein case. That story revealed the extent of collaboration between federal prosecutors and Epstein's attorneys in their efforts to keep victims from learning of the plea deal.
The Miami Herald describes an email from Epstein's attorney after his off-site meeting with Acosta: "'Thank you for the commitment you made to me during our Oct. 12 meeting,' Lefkowitz wrote in a letter to Acosta after their breakfast meeting in West Palm Beach. He added that he was hopeful that Acosta would abide by a promise to keep the deal confidential. 'You... assured me that your office would not... contact any of the identified individuals, potential witnesses or potential civil claimants and the respective counsel in this matter,' Lefkowitz wrote."
The Miami Herald article stated that certain aspects of Acosta's non-prosecution agreement violated federal law. "As part of the arrangement, Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it." Victims, former prosecutors, and the retired Palm Beach police chief were among those quoted criticizing the agreement and Acosta's role in it.
Victims' rights violation
On February 21, 2019, a ruling in federal court returned Acosta's role in the Epstein case to the headlines. The decision to keep the deal with Epstein secret until after it was finalized was found to be a violation of the Crime Victims' Rights Act of 2004, which requires notifying victims of the progress of federal criminal cases. The CVRA was new and relatively untested at the time of the Epstein non-prosecution agreement. In 2008, representatives for two of Epstein's victims filed a lawsuit in federal court aiming to vacate the federal non-prosecution agreement on the grounds that it violated the CVRA. For more than a decade, the U.S. Attorney's office denied that it acted in violation of victims' rights laws and argued that the CVRA did not apply in the Epstein case. The government's contention that the CVRA did not apply was based on questions of timing, relevance, and jurisdiction. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra rejected those arguments in the February 21, 2019 ruling, finding that the CVRA did in fact apply and that victims should have been notified of the Epstein non-prosecution agreement in advance of its signing, to afford them the opportunity to influence its terms. At the conclusion of his ruling, the federal judge in the case noted that he was "not ruling that the decision not to prosecute was improper", but was "simply ruling that, under the facts of this case, there was a violation of the victims rights under the CVRA."The Eleventh Circuit affirmed Marra's decision, but then sitting en banc revisited that decision and ruled otherwise, in "Doe No. 1 v. United States, 749 F. 3d 999 " and in February 2022 the Roberts Supreme Court decided to let that judgment rest. The court found that the CVRA did not create a right for victims to sue the US government if no indictment was actually filed.
Following the Herald investigation and related news coverage, a group of 15 Democratic members of Congress submitted a formal request to the U.S. Department of Justice for review of Acosta's role in the Epstein deal, and several editorials called for Acosta's resignation or termination from his then-current position as U.S. Labor Secretary. In February 2019, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility notified Senator Ben Sasse that it had opened an investigation into Epstein's prosecution.