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Alexander Acosta

Rene Alexander Acosta (16 January 1969-) was the US Secretary of Labor from 28 April 2017 to 19 July 2019, succeeding Tom Perez and preceding Patrick Pizzella. He resigned in July 2019 after it became public that he had given billionaire sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein a lenient plea deal in 2009 without the consent of Epstein's victims.

Biography[]

Rene Alexander Acosta was born in Miami, Florida in 1969, the only son of Cuban immigrants. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1994 and served as a law clerk to circuit court judge (and future US Supreme Court justice) Samuel Alito from 1994 to 1995, later working for Kirkland & Ellis in Washington DC. He served on the National Labor Relations Board from 2002 to 2003, as US Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division from 2003 to 2005, as US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida from 2005 to 2009, and as Dean of the Florida International University College of Law from 2009 to 2017. That year, he was appointed Secretary of Labor after Andrew Puzder's nomination was withdrawn, having been recommended to President Donald Trump by White House Counsel Don McGahn. On 6 July 2019, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for the sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York, and. Not long after, it became highly publicized that, in 2008, Acosta had given Epstein a plea deal to register as a sex offender and pay restitution to earlier victims without serving any jail time, and most of his 36 victims had no opportunity to give input for the plea deal. The scrutiny brought to the Department of Labor led to Acosta voluntarily resigning on 12 July 2019, becoming effective a week later.

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