Donald Trump’s embattled Labour Secretary, Alex Acosta, has resigned amid fierce criticism over his handling of a plea deal for financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2007.
Announcing the news on Friday, Mr Trump was eager to emphasise that Mr Acosta had made the decision himself and still had his full backing.
“This was him, not me,” the US president said as he announced the news outside the White House, describing Mr Acosta as a “great, great secretary” and a “tremendous talent”.
Mr Acosta was the US attorney for Southern Florida when, in 2007, Epstein escaped prosecution on federal sex-trafficking charges and was instead allowed to plead guilty to lesser state crimes.
Epstein, who potentially faced a life sentence, was jailed for 13 months but allowed to leave jail for 12 hours, six days a week, to go to work. He was also required to register as a sex offender and compensate his victims.
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Perhaps the most controversial element was an agreement between Epstein’s lawyers and federal prosecutors that his victims would not be informed of the arrangement. Earlier this year a judge ruled that the concealment was unlawful.
Dozens of women have accused Epstein, a 66-year-old multimillionaire financier and former friend of the Duke of York, Mr Trump and Bill Clinton, of bringing them to his mansions in Florida and New York for massages, and then sexually assaulting them.
Some were as young as 14. Epstein was arrested on fresh child sex trafficking charges on Saturday, bringing renewed focus to his earlier plea deal.
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Mr Acosta issued an impassioned defence of his decision not to prosecute Epstein earlier in the week, insisting that he acted with the victims’ best interests at heart, and describing a potential trial on a harsher sentence as a "roll of the dice".
“And that’s what the prosecutors of my office did – they insisted that he go to jail and put the world on notice that he was and is a sexual predator,” he said.
However on Friday he said his involvement in the controversial case had become a distraction and announced his intention to stand down in a week.
In a tweet, Mr Trump said of his secretary: “He felt the constant drumbeat of press … was bad for the Administration, which he so strongly believes in, and he graciously tendered his resignation".