The FBI wonders whether Wall Street financier Jeffrey Epstein was murdered, the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) told a Senate Committee yesterday.
As news surfaced that a federal grand jury indicted two guards at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on six counts of fraud in connection with Epstein’s death, Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, head of BOP, told the Judiciary Committee the FBI is looking at the possibility of a conspiracy in the case.
Under indictment for sex-trafficking, Epstein was found hanged by a bedsheet in his cell in MCC’s Special Housing Unit on August 10. The coroner ruled his death a suicide, but Epstein’s family and other skeptics think otherwise, given his connection to Deep State elites who would benefit if he were dead.
FBI Not So Sure
Sawyer, who landed at BOP after Epstein’s death, couldn’t say much about the probe into the convicted sex offenders’ death, but did confirm that federal gumshoes aren’t so sure Epstein killed himself.
Neither is Epstein’s family or celebrity pathologist Michael Baden, who said the three fractures in Epstein’s hyoid bone suggest strangulation, not suicidal hanging. And the pathologist who performed the autopsy did not believe his work developed “enough information to say suicide.”
New York City’s chief coroner changed that and ruled it a suicide afterward.
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Sawyer appeared before GOP Senator Lindsey Graham’s panel yesterday.
“Do you concur with the opinion that it was a suicide?” Graham asked.
“That was the finding of the coroner,” Sawyer replied, adding that she hadn’t seen any evidence to the contrary.
Sawyer said she can’t discuss the probe in detail because it is ongoing.
“With a case this high profile, there’s gotta be either a major malfunction of the system or a criminal enterprise afoot to allow this to happen,” Graham said. “So are you looking at both, is the FBI looking at both.”
“If the FBI is involved then they are looking at criminal enterprise, yes,” Sawyer replied.
Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz pressed Sawyer on the matter, noting that Epstein died before he could testify about the men who to whom he trafficked his young victims. One of the accused is Britain’s Prince Andrew.
“There were powerful men who wanted Jeffrey Epstein silenced,” he said. “There are two and only two possibilities for what happened with Jeffrey Epstein. No.1, there was gross negligence and a total failure of BOP to do its job with a prisoner on suicide watch that led to Epstein’s committing suicide. Or, No. 2, something far worse happened, that it was not suicide but rather a homicide, carried out by person or persons who wanted Epstein silenced.”
Both are “completely unacceptable” and “profound indictments of BOP and our federal incarceration system.”
“Let’s take the more damning of the scenarios,” Cruz continued. “Based on the evidence of which you’re aware, is there any indication that Jeffrey Epstein’s death was a homicide?”
Replied Sawyer, “based upon the evidence that I am aware, no…. There is no indication from anything I know, that it was anything other than a suicide.”
Epstein’s Death
Skeptics disagree.
And Epstein’s thrice-fractured hyoid bone isn’t the only reason the convicted sex offender’s death suggests foul play.
As The New American reported of Baden’s interview with Fox News, scrapings from Epstein’s fingernails that might reveal DNA and reveal a killer have not been released. Nor has the result of DNA tests on the bed-sheet ligature. Either Epstein’s or a killer’s DNA can be recovered from the sheet.
The dereliction of duty for which the guards were indicted is another problem. They either slept or played on the Internet, the indictment alleges, when they should have been checking Epstein every half hour.
The guards, the indictment alleges, not only didn’t perform their appointed rounds but also falsified records to show they did. Epstein’s cell was just a few steps away from their desk, the indictment noted.
Baden, who led the forensic pathology panel for the House Committee on Assassinations that probed the murder of President Kennedy, said he hasn’t seen such a concatenation of coincidences in a half-century of practicing forensic pathology.
As Cruz suggested, the rich, powerful men to whom Epstein trafficked his sex slaves certainly wanted Epstein dead. He knew their secrets.
Question is, are those secrets now buried because Epstein tied that bed sheet around his neck, or because the ruling-class elites who participated in abusing his victims decided it was time to shut him up?
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a longtime contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
