WASHINGTON — Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who gave Jeffrey Epstein and an untold number of his co-conspirators immunity for sex trafficking dozens of underage girls, defended his decision not to prosecute Epstein during a closed-door congressional hearing Friday.

The hearing, held by the House Oversight Committee, is the latest in a series of efforts by Congress to scrutinize how the late financier managed to get away with abusing hundreds of girls and young women over more than two decades — despite Epstein being on the FBI’s radar since 2006.

The scandal continues to consume the Trump administration, which has been unable to satisfy public outrage over the Justice Department’s decision in July to not release all of its Epstein files. Most of the material the DOJ has released thus far has already been in the public domain.

“It’s important to remember that this is a massive cover-up,” said Rep. Yassamin Ansari. “There are many, many more people involved, financial institutions involved, potentially foreign governments involved, but this is one key part to getting to the bottom and getting to the answers that we need to get justice for the survivors.”

Ansari and other Democratic congressional leaders, on a break from the hearing, described Acosta’s testimony as “defiant,” “unremorseful” and “evasive.”

They said the former FIU law professor said Epstein’s victims weren’t credible — and that he didn’t believe that their stories of sexual assault would lead to a successful federal prosecution.

Acosta “essentially said he didn’t have faith in the victims, their stories and their ability to tell their own story and their own testimony, which is deeply disturbing to all of us sitting in there,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost during the break.

They said they also found it disturbing that, even in hindsight, Acosta would not admit that mistakes were made and was not apologetic about how his actions led to other victims being abused by Epstein.

“There was a clear lack of remorse,” said Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat. “ ... This is someone who should at least acknowledge that he made a mistake ... his memory faded whenever we asked pointed questions.”

Acosta walked by reporters on his way into the hearing but did not stop to answer shouted questions.

This is the first time that Acosta, 56, has testified under oath about his decision to give Epstein a plea deal. The agreement allowed Epstein to plead guilty to lesser prostitution charges in state court rather than be prosecuted for federal sex trafficking crimes that could have sent him to prison for life.

Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in the county jail, but served just 13 months — most of it as a work-release inmate which allowed him to leave jail and go to his office in West Palm Beach almost every day. While he was monitored by Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputies, he was nevertheless able to have women come into his office, where he pressured them to have sex with him while a sheriff’s deputy was standing outside the door.

Rep. Robert Garcia, the committee’s ranking Democrat, noted that they met with survivors last month and “one of the survivors that was there was very clear that she was abused and assaulted and raped by Jeffrey Epstein during his work release, and during that time when he was out during that 18-month period that was given to him by Mr. Acosta and his team.”

Acosta, the representatives said, refused to characterize the plea bargain as a “sweetheart deal” — maintaining that even today he believes the deal was the best course of action.

Rep. James Comer, the committee’s Republican chairman, said the Democrats seemed to focus more on Trump’s relationship to Epstein than on finding out what went wrong.

“We’re trying to find out more — who dropped the ball? Was it Acosta? Was it the FBI? Was it the local prosecutors? Was it the Department of Justice? Those are the questions I think we need to know,” Comer told reporters. “Because that was part of what the victims asked us to do, was to hold people accountable in the government that failed to do their job.”

Epstein was re-arrested in 2019 following publication of a Miami Herald investigation “Perversion of Justice,” which examined court records, emails and police files that showed how Epstein’s high-powered lawyers managed to manipulate federal prosecutors, including Acosta, into minimizing the scope of Epstein’s crimes. The series led federal prosecutors in New York to take a new look at Epstein, and he was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in July 2019. He was found dead in his jail cell a month later. His death was ruled a suicide by hanging.

Acosta was Trump’s labor secretary at the time of Epstein’s 2019 arrest. He resigned days later, saying he didn’t want to become a distraction.

Acosta’s testimony on Friday comes after former Attorney General William Barr also testified before the House Oversight Committee. Barr was not attorney general when the deal was struck in 2008 but he nevertheless recalled that he suspected the deal was problematic because they had failed to notify Epstein’s victims, as they were required to do by law.

In February 2019, a federal judge ruled that Acosta and other prosecutors broke the law when they concealed the plea deal from more than 30 underage victims who were known to have been sexually assaulted by Epstein. Many of them — students at Royal Palm Beach High School — had been interviewed by the FBI and federal prosecutors.

The Herald’s investigation also showed that Acosta and his prosecutors agreed to seal the plea deal so that no one — especially not his victims — would find out about it. The Herald’s series also showed that federal prosecutors led the sentencing judge to believe there was only one victim when in fact there were at least two dozen.

Most of his victims were between the ages of 14 and 16. Many of them were from families who were struggling financially. Some of the girls were in foster homes or on the brink of homelessness.

“Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right,’’ victim Courtney Wild told the Herald for the “Perversion of Justice” series.

It’s not clear whether anyone asked Acosta why, if he believed the deal was proper, it was done in secret. Epstein’s lawyers, including Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz, insisted, and Acosta agreed to not notify Epstein’s victims that Epstein negotiated a deal. A judge eventually ordered it unsealed almost a year later but by then it was too late for anyone to undo it.

The judge further ruled that the FBI and federal prosecutors mislead the victims into believing they were continuing to investigate with the intent to prosecute Epstein. In fact, they were already negotiating a plea bargain.

Acosta was just 37 and a rising star in the Republican Party who had noble ambitions of becoming a U.S. Supreme Court justice when he was named U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in 2005. By the time he was sworn in, the FBI was already investigating Epstein, and evidence suggested that the crimes against children and young women he committed in Palm Beach went well beyond Florida.

Since then, Acosta has almost vanished from public life, other than appearing occasionally to discuss economic issues on the conservative TV network Newsmax, where he is also on the network’s board of directors and chair of its audit committee.

On Wednesday, Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie told the House Judiciary Committee that the FBI has the names of at least 20 people tied to Epstein, including prominent figures in the music industry, finance, politics and banking. The revelation that there are names of suspects in the FBI files comes as FBI Director Kash Patel also testified before Congress, insisting there is no evidence of anyone else involved in Epstein’s crimes, that there is no Epstein client list and that there have been no steps to investigate some of the men named in the FBI files.

Massie, however, suggested that Patel was playing a game of semantics, since he had seen files that showed names of other people suspected of being involved with Epstein.

Epstein’s victims also were not swayed by Patel’s testimony. One group of Epstein survivors issued a statement Thursday denouncing Patel and the Trump Justice Department for failing to fully investigate Epstein’s sex trafficking network and hold others who were involved accountable.

“As head of the FBI, Director Patel can work now to remedy that, in a way that finally centers survivor voices and finally pursues the whole truth. The public demands it; the victims deserve it; and our system of justice without fear or favor requires it,” the statement said. “Survivors are waiting."

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