Did Trump Labor Pick Protect Trump, Rich Rapists, Tax Cheats, Crooked Bankers?

President Trump nominated as labor secretary this month a former federal prosecutor suspected of covering up multiple scandals, including the alleged rape of underage girls in 1994 by billionaire pervert Jeffrey Epstein and Trump, who was Epstein’s friend and neighbor.

With a Senate confirmation hearing scheduled Wednesday, Trump picked former Bush administration prosecutor R. Alexander Acosta Feb. 16 to lead the Labor Department despite his multiple legal controversies involving sex predators, corrupt bankers and billionaire tax cheats. Their crimes largely escaped prosecution from Acosta and his law enforcement colleagues.

Most dramatic was Acosta’s confidential plea agreement in 2008 not to prosecute Epstein for operating what police described as massive sex trafficking ring that allegedly involved Trump in the rape of a 13-year-old in 1994, according to a recent lawsuit withdrawn last year.

In a virtually unprecedented concession to a defendant and his suspected accomplices, Acosta’s deal with Epstein forbade authorities from investigating his associates. These included his Palm Beach neighbor Trump, who was also a fellow wealthy socialite on Manhattan’s East Side.

Acosta’s hands-off federal posture allowed state authorities in the joint federal-state case to arrange a sweetheart deal with the billionaire (shown in a mugshot) to serve 13 months of night incarceration. This special treatment was meted out despite massive police evidence that Epstein sexually abused scores of underage girls recruited from Palm Beach area junior high and high schools.

County records show that the sentence was so light that Epstein was visited 67 times at the minimum security Palm Beach County Stockade by Nadia Marcinkova. She was an assistant who police say helped wrangle teen masseuses for Epstein and joined in what the New York Post described in 2009 as the “sordid sex play.”

More recently, a lawsuit filed last September in New York’s federal court by a “Jane Doe” (later identified as a Katie Johnson), accused Trump and Epstein of raping her in New York City in 1994 when she was a 13-year-old runaway and aspiring model.

Trump allegedly then threatened her with death if she reported her multiple rapes or Trump’s threat that she would end up like “Maria,” another underage girl who was said to have disappeared suddenly from their sex and “party” scene.

The suit was dropped last November because of what plaintiff’s attorney Lisa Bloom described as new threats from unknown sources.

Acosta and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer failed to respond to Justice Integrity Project requests for comment about Acosta. Trump named Acosta as his labor nominee soon after businessman Andrew Puzder withdrew his nomination. Puzder failed to win sufficient Senate support.

Epstein’s problems arose publicly in 2005 after a Palm Beach mother claimed that Epstein paid $300 to her 14-year old daughter for sex. Palm Beach police developed leads from there. They suggested that Epstein and his accomplices had recruited scores of underage girls from local schools for massages often leading to sexual encounters.

But there’s always a difference of opinion in such matters, particularly when friends are involved.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump (shown in a graphic by the Tax Wall Street Party) told New York Magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Acosta’s backers can be expected to steer his confirmation far away from Epstein and Trump and focus instead on the nominee’s career highlights and Hispanic background.

The Senate’s clubby traditions lend themselves to that kind of emphasis on the positive, as do the incentives of many advocacy organizations that focus their endorsements on ethnic identity and otherwise adapting to the culture of Washington.

Part of that culture, more generally, is the reluctance of many organizations to dig deep into sexual and financial topics, especially when a nomination is being pushed for fast approval, with no time for witnesses and few hard questions looming, as seems like for Acosta Wednesday morning at his so-far fast-track nomination.

This column begins a long, multi-part series that documents the horrific crimes and mind-boggling mysteries that Acosta and his colleagues helped cover-up while advancing their own careers under the nostrum of “public service.”

One path leads from Epstein to Trump to “Maria,” an allegedly 12-year-old murdered sex victim.

Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen (shown in a file photo), is a former Navy intelligence officer, NSA analyst and the author of 15 books — and one of the very few to apply both shoe leather and research skill to that angle and try to connect dots all the way to the White House.

Madsen’s columns in February on the investigative subscription service “The Wayne Madsen Report” (WMR) drew on his long study of the Epstein case legal filings.

The main such column, Trump’s Jane, Tiffany, and Joan Doe problem on Feb. 8, 2017, was published even before Acosta’s nomination. Madsen promptly followed up that nomination with such others as Labor pick Acosta part of Epstein-Trump underage sex crime cover-up on Feb. 17, 2017.

Madsen is one of the few watchdogs to pose a so-far unanswered question for Trump, Acosta and those senators who this week weigh the Acosta nomination:

“Where’s Maria?”

This series beginning today helps chart what we know of that mystery. But that search necessarily involves you and those others who might feel free to demand answers without the niceties and obstacles of official Washington.