Police Chief: DOJ Worked to Protect Epstein

The police chief who oversaw Jeffrey Epstein’s Florida case recently told the Miami Herald that state and federal governments worked against him. Moreover, he said he was intimidated and threatened over his persistence to bring Epstein to justice.

“This case, in many respects, felt like the people who work for our government were working more for Epstein than they were working for the victims and protecting the public,” Michael Reiter told the Herald.

The Florida newspaper published an article on Saturday detailing the immense pressure and obstacles Reiter and his force ran into while trying to bring Epstein to justice. Reiter was the Palm Beach police chief from 2001 to 2009.

In the article, Reiter documents a number of odd things that made this investigation different from all others. “We had a lot of physical evidence,” he said. “One of the things that was so unusual about this case is we had prosecutors who had excellent reputations, yet this case they found reasons not to prosecute.”

State Attorney

Among the many who got in Reiter’s way was Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer. When he first told Krischer that his police department was putting together a sexual battery case against a rich resident who was raping girls, Reiter said Krischer was supportive. But then “Epstein hired a powerhouse legal team, headed by some of the most aggressive lawyers in America.” Among them was Alan Dershowitz, who launched a “a scorched-earth attack on the girls and their families.” Dershowitz claimed the girls were “gold diggers who lied about their ages and had been paid money by Epstein.” Dershowitz and his team also painted the girls as prostitutes. All this changed Krischer’s posture. He ended up believing they couldn’t win the case and pressured Reiter to wrap it up and move on.

But Reiter and his lead investigator didn’t listen. They kept drafting arrest awards and probable-cause affidavits. However, Krischer “refused to sign off on them.” Instead, he told Reiter that he “wanted to close the case by writing Epstein up on a misdemeanor.”

Grand Jury

Reiter remain undeterred, so Krischer “decided to hand the decision over to a state grand jury to let them decide whether to indict Epstein on more serious criminal charges.” But even there, chicanery reared its ugly head, as Krischer’s lead assistant state attorney “failed to present evidence showing Epstein had been sex trafficking dozens of underage girls.”

Krischer and his assistant never explained why they didn’t present Epstein’s case as a sex-trafficking case. A former Palm Beach prosecutor named Jack Scarola told the Herald that Krischer’s behavior “didn’t make any sense then — and still doesn’t.” Scarola said, “It’s impossible for me to believe that he did not recognize that Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were extremely serious and that the quality of the evidence against him was very strong.”

Reiter said that “a prominent member of Palm Beach society who was also chairman of the police pension board” also told him to stop investigating Epstein. His name was C. “Gerry” Goldsmith.

Outlets such as the New York Post worked overtime to discredit Reiter and his case, as well. On July 27, 2006, the Post reported:

A state grand jury found the witnesses in the case were not credible and threw out all but the single charge of soliciting a hooker in his luxurious Palm Beach home. Epstein’s lawyers and friends now say he’s the hapless victim of a vendetta by Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter whom they describe as a “born-again nut case.”

Intimidation

Reiter also faced a bold intimidation campaign on a personal level. The Herald reported:

Epstein and his team went after Reiter with guns blazing. They had private investigators tail him. They dug into his garbage and planted stories about his divorce. They accused him of an anti-Semitic conspiracy against Epstein…. The pressure didn’t stop there, as things took a dark turn when Reiter found out that one of Epstein’s beefy bodyguards had moved into a house right next to his, as if to send a message “we are watching you.”

Reiter believed back then, and still does, that Epstein had a mole in the police department or the state attorney’s office. “He was so sure of this that he had [his lead investigator] move all their Epstein files to a separate computer server that could only be accessed by them,” the Herald reported. “When police showed up with search warrants at Epstein’s mansion in October 2005, it was clear he had been tipped off — all the computers had been removed.”

Reiter realized the state authorities were dead set on quashing this case. So he referred it to the FBI. By that time, “there were many, many more victims.”

Federal Prosecutor

Federal prosecutors took over the case in 2007. But that, too, proved problematic. The lead prosecutor in the case, Marie Villafaña, kept Reiter’s police department out of the loop. Also, the feds dragged their feet, as weeks became months without any indication that justice was coming. Meanwhile, Epstein’s henchmen were scaring victims. “They had, you know, cars running them off the road, flashing headlights into their home and phone calls and people showing up at their door,” Reiter told the newspaper.

Villafaña rain into similar resistance. “Her supervisors expressed doubts about a successful prosecution, once again noting that the girls had committed prostitution,” the Herald reports. Meanwhile, “behind her back, her bosses began negotiating a secret plea deal in earnest with Epstein’s lawyers in July 2007.”

Villafaña listed 19 instances “in which she disagreed with the decisions or was disturbed by the conduct of her supervisors.” Moreover, “she singled out the Miami U.S. Attorney, Alex Acosta, and the criminal chief, Matthew Menchel, as causing her the most concern.” She believed that Epstein’s team had “unparalleled access to the decision-makers at the Justice Department” while she and the FBI agents on the case were silenced.

Acosta

Reiter eventually asked to meet with Acosta. He reminded Acosta of the promises he made when he was sworn in. According to the article, Reiter told Acosta:

He pledged to have honest and fair prosecutions of people that did things to harm citizens of South Florida, and he said that his co-workers called him “the last boy scout” and he said all sorts of lofty things about how he was going to conduct his office as U.S. attorney.

“And I told him I remembered all that, and I said: ‘I’m here to ask you to live up to the principles that you espoused when you were sworn in,’ and then I asked him, ‘Who has the authority to make the decision of whether or not to federally prosecute Epstein?” said Reiter.

Acosta didn’t respond. So Reiter reminded the U.S. attorney that he had the power to prosecute Epstein. “I basically told him to do his job,” Reiter said. That’s when Acosta told him the DOJ was getting in the way of that. Reiter said this is what Acosta told him:

We have been receiving some guidance from main justice and the defense attorneys have done a very effective job in stalling the case.

Sweetheart Deal

Shortly afterward, Epstein received his famous sweetheart deal. The Herald investigator reporter who spearheaded the 2018 Epstein investigative series “Perversion of Justice” commented on the deal:

A man molests all these young girls and he somehow gets this secret deal that nobody knows about until the last minute. He goes to a local jail, not to a state prison, where most sex offenders in Florida are sent. He is picked up every day at this jail by his own private valet. And he’s driven to his office and he’s allowed to have visitors.

The Herald report is considered one of the big reasons the DOJ decided to take another look at Epstein. In July 2019, the DOJ decided to charge him with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors. 

Arrest and Death

Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019, at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, after returning from Paris on his private jet. And this time, he wasn’t allowed to have a valet bring him back and forth to jail, where he later died. The official story is that he killed himself, but that story is highly suspicious.

In November 2025, President Donald Trump, after much kicking and screaming, signed into law the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Since then, the DOJ made more than 3 million files public, many of them highly redacted. Nevertheless, the files make clear that Epstein was an international man of power. He had connections in media, government, and finance.

But while the DOJ released 3 million files, it’s still holding on to another 2.5 million — and it’s doing so illegally. The obvious question is: What are they hiding? What does the DOJ have on Epstein that is so sensitive that it would rather tell the entire country that it’s corrupt than reveal?

Reiter’s account in this recent Herald report bolsters the suspicion that Epstein’s power extended to the highest tiers of the U.S. government. It also sends the clear and obvious message that the American justice system is obviously corrupt.