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Deposition Transcripts · Segments · #9793
id
9793
deposition id
15
segment index
33
speaker
Page 34
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end seconds
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sex or was he more -- was he like a customer or a “John” and this is a prostitution case where some of the individuals were underage but that he didn't know that? Okay? And, importantly, he provided me with this letter that was a lengthy -- a lengthy submission by an attorney named Stephanie Thacker, who I knew to be a sitting -- at the time I read the letter, I knew to be a sitting Federal Court of Appeals judge. And the importance to me about the letter, which I read at the time, was that it wasn't just that it was an advocacy piece that a defense lawyer submitted, but it was written to the Deputy Attorney General's office and it was a analysis and a -- about the evidence that had been uncovered in the case. And she stated unequivocally that there was not evidence that Epstein had targeted minors for sex. And she wouldn't -- you have to remember that, you know, I was the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, and so those kinds of letters came to me when I sat in that seat, those types of letters. Obviously not this letter. I wasn't there then. But the last thing a lawyer would do is go to the Justice Department and say "the evidence shows this" to the people who know what the evidence actually is, because if you did that and you were misstating the evidence, you would have zero credibility. So that letter was -- really formed the basis of my understanding of what his prior conduct in Florida was, and that letter was consistent with what he told me and corroborated what he told me. Q Were you shocked at all that Mr. Epstein was granted pretty compassionate work release? A I didn't know anything about the circumstances of that. You know, I didn't -- I certainly -- "compassionate release" in law enforcement circles has a particular – it has a very specific meaning, and it typically has to do with poor health or something like that. I didn't understand it to be anything along those lines. I believed that the State -- you know, ultimately, this was a State resolution that the Federal Government, you know -- the Federal Government had made a decision not to prosecute him, but it was a State resolution. And the inference that I drew as a former Federal