The case against Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell will be handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Law & Crime reports.
Maxwell was arrested by FBI agents on Thursday and after a hearing, the SDNY took control of the case.
Specifically, the department’s public corruption unit will be overseeing Maxwell’s prosecution. She was arrested on charges that she helped procure underage sex partners for Epstein.
The unit looks into crimes committed by elected and appointed officials, government employees, and people conducting business with government entities, according to the Department of Justice’s website.
The fact that the corruption unit has taken control of the case has many people believing that elected officials could be involved.
“I worked at SDNY and did sex trafficking cases,” former federal and state prosecutor and current CNN legal analyst Elie Honig tweeted. “They do NOT run out of Public Corruption – unless there is some potential angle against a public official.”
Honig told Law & Crime that this type of case would typically be assigned to the Violent and Organized Crime Unit, which is where human and sex trafficking coordinators are located.
“The fact that it is staffed out of Public Corruption tells me that a public official–past or present–is involved in at least some capacity,” Honig said. “Could mean a potential target, witness, or a potential co-conspirator. It could mean a lot of different things.”
Former SDNY deputy chief and now CNN legal analyst Jennifer Rodgers told Law & Crime that it was the public corruption unit that brought the original charges against Epstein.
She said she thinks the Maxwell charges being housed there are a result of “the involvement of public officials in Florida in giving Epstein the sweetheart plea deal a number of years ago,” Rodgers said. “My educated guess is that part of this investigation has involved whether any of those officials had done anything wrong (like accepting bribes) in connection with that matter.”
In an email to Law & Crime, Rodgers said the new charges were “potentially bad news for anyone who may have been involved.”
She added it is unclear whether or not Maxwell will cooperate with the prosecution.
“[I]f she did presumably she would have information to share about other participants,” Rodgers said. “[T]he Public Corruption Unit is the right home for this case (even though a straight-up sex trafficking case would be handled out of the Organized and Violent Crimes unit), but whether we will see any public officials charged remains to be seen,” she said.
Another former SDNY prosecutor Mimi Rocah also said it is unusual to have a human trafficking case in the public corruption unit, but said there aren’t enough facts known about the case.
“I agree that it’s very unusual to have a human trafficking case in [the] PC Unit,” she said in an email. “But once the case was there originally they wouldn’t switch it now even if there are not public figure targets. So I don’t know that we can read that much into it standing alone.”
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