Episode Details

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation into the handling of Jeffrey Epstein’s case ultimately cleared Palm Beach County officials, including former State Attorney Barry Krischer and members of the sheriff’s office, of criminal wrongdoing. The probe had been ordered after renewed scrutiny of the extraordinary treatment Epstein received in Florida, including the weak state prosecution that followed the Palm Beach Police Department’s investigation and the unusually generous work-release conditions he enjoyed after pleading guilty. FDLE concluded that it had found no evidence that Krischer, prosecutors or sheriff’s personnel had been bribed, coerced or otherwise engaged in criminal activity, and it did not find sufficient evidence that Epstein had received unlawful special treatment. That conclusion effectively allowed Florida officials to say that, however controversial the decisions surrounding Epstein had been, investigators had not established a prosecutable corruption scheme behind them.

The problem was that the report’s narrow focus on provable criminal misconduct left many of the most important questions essentially untouched. The absence of evidence of bribery or coercion did not explain why Palm Beach police developed evidence involving numerous underage girls while Krischer’s office pursued a dramatically weaker case, why prosecutors presented such a limited version of the evidence to the grand jury, or why Epstein later received jail privileges that looked extraordinary by any common-sense measure. Contemporary accounts from former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter and others showed just how stark the disagreement had been between police, who believed they had built a serious sexual-assault case, and prosecutors, who treated the matter far more cautiously. So while FDLE technically “cleared” Florida officials of criminal wrongdoing, that finding should not be confused with a finding that the system functioned properly. The report answered the easiest legal question, whether investigators could prove officials committed crimes, while leaving the much harder and more consequential question largely unresolved: how a wealthy, well-connected sex offender with numerous identified victims received an outcome that ordinary defendants could scarcely have imagined.


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