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This is the part that boggles my mind. Just incredible incompetence not to seize and search the computers. The kind of mistake a first-year prosecutor would make. And to be clear, I think it was incredible incompetence, not a conspiracy.
Also true with those same (or at least potentially the same) computer items resurfacing in NY when his apartment was searched and the FBI failing to secure them.
What actually gets me is a different question: Why the hell is the US attorney even making calls like that? My general takeaway is that the US Government would greatly benefit by following the process most local prosecutors offices have: Police investigate crimes, sometimes they come to the prosecutors for things like subpoenas, search warrants, and legal advice, but largely they investigate cases on their own. THEN they present findings to the prosecutors who decide which charges best apply to the case. The prosecutor then files those charges and gets a grand jury to indict it (or very rarely they will deliver a no true bill, at which point the case is dead). This whole situation of prosecutors actively participating in the investigation of crimes and negotiating with defense counsel before investigations are concluded and charges are filed is just begging for corruption to enter into the process.
No, that is bad and stupid. They should not be meeting with defense until after charges are filed. If defense convinces you that the most serious charges are legally insufficient, you can move to have them dismissed and proceed on the lesser charges instead. This happens as a matter of course in state trials. A defendant may be charged with First Degree Murder, and then plead to 2nd Degree, or Manslaughter in exchange for dismissal of the higher charges. The US Attorneys seem to have tied themselves into knots with odd self-imposed regulations that seem to only serve two purposes: 1) Enable corruption; and 2) Keep their caseloads low by refusing to prosecute cases they might lose.
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To clarify, when police searched Epstein's house as part of the initial investigation, the computers had already been removed. Later, the FBI learned that they were in the custody of a certain individual, and the USAO requested that they be turned over. Epstein's attorneys initially agreed to produce them by a certain date, then asked for an extension, and on the extension deadline they took legal action to prevent having to turn them over. By this point negotiations were underway, and in the course of negotiations the USAO agreed to postpone the date of the hearing, which was then rescheduled for late September. By this point, the self-imposed indictment deadline was nearing, and the parties were close to a deal, and they agreed to postpone the hearing indefinitely, Once the deal was signed the matter was dropped.
I agree with you that they should have pushed the computer issue a little harder, but I can understand why they didn't. The idea that they would contain evidence that improved the prosecution's position was speculative. I wouldn't call it incompetence so much as poor judgment. If the computers contained video of Epstein engaging in the sex acts that they already knew about, it would improve the case, but not by much. They could have been a game changer, but that was conditioned on them containing child pornography, or worse, containing evidence that he transmitted CP over the internet.
We need to step back and consider what they were likely dealing with. This was 2005, and the taping system probably wasn't brand new. You were looking at 480p tops, compressed, taken with a wide angle lens. I don't have any information about the camera equipment that the police discovered, but they did mention that the cameras were hooked up to the computers for recording. Epstein could certainly afford commercial-grade recording equipment, but most such equipment would have recorded to disc at the time, and not a PC. So we're likely looking at webcams. In either event, though, any video would have been low-resolution and recorded from a fixed vantage point. Webcam videos from 2005 weren't great, and commercial surveillance video wasn't much better. There would have been problems authenticating the video and identifying the victim as a minor.
I think that Acosta's plan was stupid and ultimately ineffective. It's certainly not what I would have done had I been in charge. However, once they were committed to that course of action, I don't think that yielding on the computer issue was a huge mistake. A mistake, yes, but not a huge one. It's pretty clear that the defense strategy was to draw out the process as long as possible. If the prosecutors had insisted on sticking to the September hearing, it would have required postponing the indictment deadline again, since they'd need to give time for the defense to turn over the computers and for the FBI to analyze them, and then to figure out what what to do with the information. The defense holding back could have just been a ruse to get another extension. I personally think that once they became aware that the defense had the computers they should have put everything on hold until they got them, but Acosta was hell-bent on state charges and thought a deal would be easy. I think Acosta just figured that the indictment was ready to go and if they made a deal he'd be happy and if they had to indict there was plenty of time to get the computers. I don't think he wanted to delay things based on the speculation that there might be evidence of other crimes. It was a bad decision but it was understandable.
That's such a huge game changer, and should be painfully obvious to any prosecutor with experience. Possession of CP triggers all kinds of mandatory minimums that increase the prosecution's leverage by absurd amounts (federally, anyway. I don't know if Florida law has mandatory minimums for it). Even a 1% chance of the computers containing it dramatically changes the case, and it's a tiny mental stretch made by prosecutors every day to say, "hey, we're investigating this guy for sex crimes, perhaps he's a CP collector, too."
You could be right that his homemade videos at the time would be worthless in strengthening the case against him with regards to the known victims. But the chance of finding CP has had every prosecutor I've dealt with jumping at the chance to seize every single electronic device possible from suspects. Proving a hands-on offense with a victim with credibility and reliability issues is tricky; proving possession of CP doesn't have those problems. I don't have training materials from USAO from that era, but even in 2005, I have a hard time believing it wasn't common knowledge that finding CP on a suspect's computer was the "easy win" button.
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I think you could have a more charitable take where the government isn't sending a lot of resources and doesn't have a lot of leadership buy-in (because the crimes are ironically not very sexy, ultimately pretty small, and it is somewhat sketchy that it is federal at all) and the person they are prosecuting is throwing every last financial resource at it because he doesn't want 20 years in jail.
This can easily result in the prosecution being tired, busy, buried in paperwork with minimal resources and therefore forgetting things that now seem brain dead obvious.
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In our previous conversation, Rov dismissed my argument saying if there was a conspiracy, the entire DOJ would have to be in on it. Isn't arguing for this level of incompetence effectively arguing that no, you just have to get the guy on the top, and the rest of the apparatus will be happy to bumble along, no matter how absurd their decisions are?
There are many ways that Epstein would know about the investigation ahead of time. Given the entire high school knew, chances are one of the girls just told him long before police came knocking.
I'm not sure where you're going with that. That Epstein prepared himself by hiding / deleting evidence? Isn't Rov's point in this post that one way or the other, there was more than enough to lock him up, and it was only due to Acosta's poor judgement that he got off easy?
And again, what was his re-prosecution based on then, some decade later, with even less physical evidence, and witness testimony even more dubious? How was Maxwell sentenced for so long?
Or am I misunderstanding your argument, and you meant something else entirely?
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