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Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document 293-1 Filed 05/25/21 Page 314 of 349

METHODOLOGY

A. Document Review

As referenced in the Executive Summary, OPR obtained and reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida (USAO), other U.S. Attorney’s offices, the FBI, and other Department components, including the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, the Criminal Division, and the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys (EOUSA). The categories of documents reviewed by OPR, and their sources, are set forth below.

1. USAO Records

The USAO provided OPR with access to all of its records from its handling of the Epstein investigation and the CVRA litigation. The records included, but were not limited to, boxes of material that Villafaña updated and maintained through the course of both actions, which contained pleadings from the Epstein investigation, the CVRA litigation, and other related cases; extensive compilations of internal and external correspondence, including letters and emails; evidence such as telephone records, FBI reports, material received from the state investigation, and other confidential investigative records; court transcripts; investigative transcripts; prosecution team handwritten notes; research material; and draft and final case documents such as the NPA, prosecution memoranda, and federal indictments.

The USAO also provided OPR with access to filings, productions, and privileged material in the CVRA litigation; Outlook data collected to respond to production requests in that case; a set of Epstein case documents maintained by Acosta and Sloman; computer files regarding the Epstein case collected by Sloman; Villafaña’s Outlook data; Acosta’s hard drive; and the permanently retained official U.S. Attorney records of Acosta held by the Federal Records Center.

2. EOUSA Records

EOUSA provided OPR with Outlook data from all five subjects and six additional witnesses. This information, dating back to 2005, included all inbox, outbox, sent, deleted, and saved emails, and calendar entries that it maintained. EOUSA provided OPR with over 850,000 Outlook records in total (not including email attachments or excluding duplicate records). OPR identified key time periods and fully reviewed those records. OPR applied search terms to the remainder of the records and reviewed any responsive documents.

After reviewing the emails, OPR identified a data gap in Acosta’s email records: his inbox contained no emails from May 26, 2007, through November 2, 2008. This gap, however, was not present with respect to Acosta’s sent email. OPR requested that EOUSA investigate. During its investigation, EOUSA discovered a data association error that incorrectly associated Acosta’s data with an unrelated employee who had a similar name. Once the data was properly associated, EOUSA found and produced 11,248 Acosta emails from April 3, 2008, through the end of his tenure at the USAO. However, with respect to the remaining emails, EOUSA concluded that the emails were not transferred from the USAO when, in 2008 and 2009, Outlook data for all U.S.

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