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victims here’’d. Dershowitz, with chest pounding bravado, rejects a series of lower-level plea deals and Palm Beach District Attorney Barry Krischer takes the unusual step of empanelling a grand jury, which returns with a recommendation of a single count of soliciting a prostitute—a charge without jail time. (And Epstein can apply to have his record expunged after a year.) At which point, Reiter, the police chief, at odds with the District Attorney’s office, recruits the involvement of the FBI. This is of course the Bush-era FBI and Epstein presents quite the Clinton-connected scandal. Still, solicitation, even of a minor, is not a federal crime. The FBI hits on the novel interpretation that if Internet solicitation can be considered interstate commerce, so can telephone solicitation, permitting them to begin a deep dive investigation into Epstein’s friends, many of whom receive subpoenas and are threatened with prosecution. It’s all quite in the eye of the beholder: On the one end, Epstein is paying for sex acts (Epstein paid $200 for a massage with or without happy ending), on the other, he is abusing teenage girls. It’s a catch-22: How can a girl not old enough to vote be a prostitute? And yet, many girls not old enough to vote are without a doubt prostitutes. Compounding Epstein’s predicament, the world outside of his carefully constructed and controlled environment is someplace that he seems not just ill-equipped to handle but in which he seems to be blindly grouping about (i.e. he’s totally tone deaf). I visited him once during this time and found him weighing the conflicting advice of some of the most vaunted and egomaniacal lawyers (along with Dershowitz and Black, celebrity criminal attorney, Gerald Lefcourt, and Clinton prosecutor, Ken Starr) of the day—anyone with new advice, Epstein seemed to hire—as well as a catchall of the leading crisis managers, who he seemed to retain at will, all wrangling for fees and primacy. Certainly, the upshot of his dealings with the Justice Department seem to involve a through-the-looking-glass logic. The government threatens to prosecute him (with the possibility of a 10-year sentence) and various friends, associates, and lovers, or offers what seems to be unprecedented arrangement in which Epstein’s lawyers (not federal prosecutors, but Epstein’s lawyers, in some ultimate act of self incrimination) have to go to the Palm Beach authorities and convince them to up the charges to an offense that will send him to jail and get him a sex offender status. Except that a solicitation charge won’t produce that result. Therefore he has to get them to agree to a procurement or pimping charge (even though he has paid money, not received it—the sine qua non of pimping). What’s more, in a unique, if not unprecedented arrangement, he has to agree to pay the legal fees of any of the girls who want to sue him—and, agree not to defend himself from their suits—forcing him to settle with each of the girls for what are reportedly high HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022859