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Not long after a 14-year-old girl reported Jeffery Epstein to authorities in 2005, she says she received a warning from someone who claimed to be in contact with the well-connected financier. The girl would be paid cash if she agreed not to cooperate with law enforcement, the person told the accuser, adding that "those who help him will be compensated and those who hurt him will be dealt with," according to a Palm Beach, Florida, police report reflecting the accuser's statement. The threat was one of many intimidation and bare-knuckle tactics that accusers and witnesses told police they faced after...

On a muggy October morning in 2007, Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz. It was an unusual meeting for the then-38-year-old prosecutor, a rising Republican star who had served in several White House posts before being named U.S. attorney in Miami by President George W. Bush. Instead of meeting at the prosecutor’s Miami headquarters, the two men — both with professional roots in the prestigious Washington law firm of Kirkland & Ellis — convened at the Marriott in West Palm Beach, about 70 miles away. For Lefkowitz,...

Rice Slams US Envoy's NKorea Criticism By FOSTER KLUG – 2 hours ago WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday sharply rebuked a fellow member of the Bush administration who criticized international negotiations aimed at persuading North Korea to scrap its nuclear weapons program. Rice said that Jay Lefkowitz, President Bush's special envoy on North Korean human rights, "doesn't know what's going on in the six-party talks, and he certainly has no say on what American policy will be in the six-party talks." Lefkowitz said Thursday that the North is not serious about disarming and probably still...

U.S. disavows envoy's harsh view of N.Korea talks By Paul Eckert, Asia Correspondent Fri Jan 18, 3:29 PM ET The State Department on Friday distanced itself from a presidential envoy's remarks that North Korea was not serious about its nuclear disarmament commitments and would keep its atomic weapons after the Bush administration leaves office next year. Jay Lefkowitz, President George W. Bush's special envoy on North Korea human rights, said on Thursday that Pyongyang's failure to meet a key deadline in the nuclear agreement "signals that North Korea is not serious about disarming in a timely manner." In a speech...

North Korea is unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons before President Bush leaves office, a U.S. official said Thursday. U.S. envoy Jay Lefkowitz has said human rights must be a component of disarmament talks. "North Korea is not serious about disarming in a timely manner," Jay Lefkowitz, the president's envoy on North Korean human rights, told an audience at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. ...snip.......White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in a statement, "Under agreements reached in the six-party process, North Korea has committed to declare all its nuclear programs and to disable the three key nuclear facilities...

On August 9, 2001, President Bush announced a compromise decision on the contentious question of whether the federal government should provide financial support for research into the curative properties of human stem cells extracted from embryos. Bush’s compromise allowed funding for research into embryonic stem cells that had already been harvested. At the same time, he disallowed funding for procedures that would collect stem cells from frozen (but still living) embryos, since doing so would require their destruction. In the case of those already collected, he said, “The life-or-death decision has already been made.” But that life-or-death decision would not...

Top White House posts go to Jews Nathan Guttman, THE JERUSALEM POST Apr. 25, 2006 After appointing Joshua Bolten to be the White House chief of staff, US President George W. Bush nominated another Jewish staffer, Joel Kaplan, to serve as Bolten's deputy, putting him in charge of the daily policy planning. The fact that White House policy is now in the hands of two Jews is not seen as significant by activists in the American Jewish community. "He is simply appointing the best people for the job," said Nathan Diament, who heads the Washington office of the Orthodox Union....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With charges expected as early as Wednesday, federal officials investigating the exposure of CIA operative Valerie Plame conducted last-minute interviews with her neighbors and associates of Karl Rove and other top White House aides, lawyers said on Tuesday. Marc Lefkowitz, who lives across the street from Plame, told Reuters two FBI agents asked him on Monday if he knew about Plame's CIA work before her identity was leaked to the press in 2003. Lefkowitz said he told them: "I didn't know."

'The Making of a Philosopher': The Intensely Examined Life By MARY LEFKOWITZ Socrates always insisted that what he knew was worth little or nothing, even though no less an authority than the Delphic oracle said that there was no one wiser than he. Philosophers are not ''lovers of wisdom,'' in the literal meaning of the word, but lovers of the search for understanding. They cannot rest until they can determine for themselves and explain to their colleagues how they know what can be known, and why it is worth knowing. Not everyone would be happy living this kind of intensely...