Which prosecutors and DOJ officials signed off on the 2008 Epstein NPA?
Executive summary
The 2008 non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with Jeffrey Epstein was approved and entered by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida while Alexander (Alex) Acosta served as U.S. Attorney, and the agreement itself is publicly available in DOJ/DocumentCloud holdings [1] [2]. A later Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) review found that Acosta displayed “poor judgment” in overseeing the resolution, while concluding the prosecutors did not commit prosecutorial misconduct in a way that warranted discipline under DOJ rules [3] [4].
1. The central signatory: Alexander Acosta and the Southern District of Florida
The public record and DOJ materials show the NPA was the product of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida under U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, who oversaw and approved the office’s decision to resolve the federal inquiry through the 2008 agreement that deferred federal prosecution while Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges [2] [4] [5]. Acosta’s role has been the focus of congressional and media attention—he was subpoenaed and questioned by the House Oversight Committee about his supervision of the deal [2], and the OPR report explicitly criticized his judgment in the handling of the matter [3].
2. The agreement document and the USAO’s role
The NPA itself has been released into the public record and is hosted on DocumentCloud and DOJ repositories, showing the Southern District of Florida’s commitment not to pursue federal charges for the conduct described in the joint investigation if Epstein fulfilled the state plea conditions [1] [5]. Contemporary reporting and later DOJ disclosures emphasize that the agreement bound the USAO–SDFL and that the NPA’s terms were negotiated by federal prosecutors in Florida who drafted indictments and prosecution memoranda in the mid-2000s before the final resolution was reached [6] [1].
3. Who else at DOJ signed off or was implicated by reviews
DOJ’s internal Office of Professional Responsibility investigated the conduct of federal prosecutors involved in the Epstein matter and reported publicly that while Acosta exhibited “poor judgment,” the OPR did not find prosecutorial misconduct rising to the level of disciplinary violations by the line prosecutors—though the office also criticized failures to keep victims adequately informed [3] [4]. Reporting notes that multiple federal prosecutors worked on draft indictments and prosecution memoranda in 2006–2007, material that later surfaced in releases of seized files and internal DOJ reviews, but the provided sources do not include a complete roster of every prosecutor’s signature on the final NPA beside the clear supervisory imprimatur of the USAO under Acosta [6] [1].
4. Transparency, subsequent releases, and limits of the public record
Congressional interest and the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act prompted large releases of DOJ materials in 2026, and the department says it has produced millions of pages that include draft indictments, memoranda and the NPA itself, which are intended to clarify who authored and approved which documents [7] [8] [9]. Those releases have illuminated draft charging decisions prepared by Florida federal prosecutors and confirmed the USAO-SDFL’s central role [6], but the documents available in the sources provided here do not present a single, fully annotated list of every individual DOJ attorney who signed or formally authorized the 2008 NPA beyond the clear association with Acosta’s office [1] [10].
5. Competing narratives and institutional interests
Advocates and some congressional Democrats have characterized the NPA as a secret, overly lenient deal that shielded Epstein and potential co-conspirators, which drove the OPR probe and sustained political pressure on Acosta [2] [3]. DOJ statements accompanying later file releases have emphasized statutory compliance with transparency obligations and denied the existence of a separate “tranche” of withheld secret documents [7] [9], an institutional framing that seeks to limit claims of concealment even as oversight Democrats and journalists press for fuller disclosure of which individual prosecutors approved each step [7] [2].
6. Bottom line and reporting limits
The public record assembled by the Department of Justice, DocumentCloud, congressional materials and news reporting consistently identifies the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida—and its then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta—as the office that approved and entered the 2008 NPA [1] [2] [4], and DOJ’s OPR review criticized Acosta’s judgment while not concluding prosecutorial misconduct by line prosecutors [3] [4]. The sources provided here do not supply a single, source-cited list of every prosecutor’s signature block authorizing the final agreement beyond that institutional attribution; readers seeking a notarized roster of individual signatories should consult the full NPA document on DocumentCloud and the complete DOJ production of Epstein files for signature pages and internal memoranda [1] [6].