American laws against sexual exploitation, molesting, and trafficking underage persons are established laws at the state and federal levels. But how those laws are actually applied and prosecuted depends entirely on who is doing it, where, and how much money and political power they have.
This is evident in the front-page cases against Jeffrey Epstein, the Manhattan millionaire and politically connected criminal, and the prosecution of David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, who was in a remote location, in a compound surrounded by fences and patrolled by armed members.
The Epstein child trafficking case, and other crimes yet to be announced after a decades-long investigation that began in 2005, is still front-page news. However, many people have forgotten about the Koresh case in which 86 men, women, and children were killed by FBI agents after their compound was attacked by agents using a tank, rifles, and gas after a 51-day siege.
What led to the attack were reports (later unproven) that the sect was abusing children who lived in the compound. Koresh claimed to be a prophet and took numerous teenage women as wives.
The attack was ordered by President Bill Clinton, a conservative corporate Democrat, who wanted to embellish his reputation as a “law and order” president who was tough on crime. Attorney General Janet Reno approved the military-style attack on civilians, which was later criticized as bungled and unnecessarily lethal.
To keep the dissenters quiet, in a subsequent trial, the judge overruled the request by the jurors to impose lenient sentences on the survivors of the attack. But the judge ignored the request and sentenced the survivors to prison sentences of up to 40 years, as described in the book, A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn.
The Waco attack became a major rallying cry for people who objected to this federal lethal force against civilians, and it haunted Clinton and Reno through their respective tenures.
It also made a significant impression on Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran who visited Waco twice. Distrustful of the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), and the Federal government, he then devised and conducted an attack on the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. The resulting explosion killed 168 people, injured 684 people, and destroyed one-third of the federal building. McVeigh considered himself.
In the Waco, Texas, attack, molesting children was cited as a main reason for the military -style onslaught. In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, who operated a child trafficking ring in Manhattan, Palm Beach, and on an island in the Virgin Islands, no military-style attack was ever planned or launched.
Instead, this politically connected and wealthy millionaire was only prosecuted and jailed decades after the first reports in 2005 of his prostitution activities were presented to law enforcement officials.
In May 2007, federal officials noted 60 criminal counts against Epstein. In July 2007, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta (who in 2017 would become President Trump’s Labor Secretary), offered Epstein a deal to end the investigation if he pleaded guilty to two state charges and agreed to go to prison, register as a sexual offender, and pay monetary damages to his victims.
The controversial part was that Acosta offered Epstein immunity from further prosecution through a non-prosecution agreement. This meant no tanks or armed FBI agents would attack his homes or invade his island.
As we know, there are an undetermined number of files from the FBI, the Justice Department, or the Epstein estate that have yet to be released by the Trump administration.
Justice Depends on Who You Know
In the U.S., depending on who you are and how much money and political power you have, the results of the “impartial” justice system are anything but impartial. In Waco, the victims were sentenced to prison terms. In the Epstein case, some victims had to wait decades for their cases to even come before a court.
So, the next time you watch Law & Order, Special Victims Unit, NCIS, or any of the other police shows that glorify the law enforcement industry, remember that money is the best defense against any crime, white- or blue-collar.
As for being prosecuted for molesting or trafficking children, the system still proves that it is who you know, your political connections, and how much money you have that determine justice.
