Acosta Resigned. The Caligula Administration Lives On.
On Monday, Donald Trump disinvited the then-British ambassador, Kim Darroch, from an official administration dinner with the emir of Qatar, because he was mad about leaked cables in which Darroch assessed the president as insecure and incompetent.
There was room at the dinner, however, for Trumps friend Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, who was charged in a prostitution sting this year. Kraft was allegedly serviced at a massage parlor that had once been owned by Li Yang, known as Cindy, a regular at Trumps club Mar-a-Lago. Yang is now the target of an F.B.I. inquiry into whether she funneled Chinese money into Trumps political operation.
An ordinary president would not want to remind the world of the Kraft and Yang scandals at a time when Jeffrey Epsteins arrest has hurled Trumps other shady associations back into the limelight. Epstein, indicted on charges of abusing and trafficking underage girls, was a friend of Trumps until the two had a falling out, reportedly over a failed business deal. The New York Times reported on a party Trump threw at Mar-a-Lago whose only guests were him, Epstein and around two dozen women flown in to provide the entertainment.
Epstein, of course, was also linked to the administration in another way. The presidents labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, was the United States attorney who oversaw a secret, obscenely lenient deal that let Epstein escape federal charges for sex crimes over a decade ago. On Friday, two days after a tendentious, self-serving news conference defending his handling of the Epstein case, Acosta finally resigned.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/opinion/acosta-epstein-trump.html