Don’t expect the “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” memes to go away anytime soon.
The latest turn in the case is that someone destroyed the video that recorded the doings outside Jeffrey Epstein’s cell during a suicide attempt by him in July. So not only is video from the night of Epstein’s death missing, but also from the night of the claimed suicide attempt.
Epstein was found dead on August 10. Jail officers at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York found him after what the city’s coroner called a suicide. Epstein was under indictment for sex trafficking young girls.
Skeptics, including his family, aren’t so sure he killed himself, given his notoriety, his connection to the ruling class powerbrokers, and the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death.
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Now this: Video that might shed light on the events that led to his death is gone forever.
Oops, Double Oops
The latest “head-spinning” federal foul-up, the New York Daily News reported yesterday, is revealed in a letter from Assistant U.S. Attorneys Maurene Comey and Jason Swergold.
As The New American reported last month, citing the Daily News, the footage from outside his cell the day of his first suicide attempt went missing. But then the prosecutor said it had, indeed, been preserved. Not so, the newspaper divulged.
Swergold said last month in White Plains Federal Court that the video had not been preserved. He reversed himself less than 24 hours later, saying it had been archived.
Now, the feds say that due to a record-keeping error, Metropolitan Correctional Center staff preserved footage from outside the wrong cell — and the Epstein footage is gone.
“The footage contained on the preserved video was for the correct date and time, but captured a different tier than the one where Cell-1 was located because the preserved video did not show corrections officers responding to any of the cells seen on the video. After speaking with MCC legal counsel, the Government was informed that the MCC computer system listed a different, incorrect cell for Tartaglione,” prosecutors wrote in a letter filed in Manhattan Federal Court.
Even worse, there was a backup system for jail video footage — but that wasn’t working, either. “The requested video no longer exists on the backup system and has not since at least August 2019 as a result of technical errors,” the prosecutors wrote.
The footage is important to Epstein’s one-time cellmate Nick Tartaglione, who needed the video because it might prove, his attorney says, that he acted “admirably” and tried to save Epstein’s life.
Tartaglione’s attorney, Bruce Barket wrote to the Daily News:
It is stunning that a video which we asked to be preserved and which the jail should have saved without a request was destroyed. More troubling are the various and inconsistent accounts of what happened to the video. We believe that the video would have strongly corroborated our client’s assertion that he acted appropriately that evening and are deeply disturbed it has disappeared.
Tartaglione, who faces the death penalty in the murder of four men over a drug deal, hoped the footage might lead to sparing his life.
Other Missing Video
Yet perhaps even more importantly, video cameras outside Epstein’s jail cell just happened to malfunction the day he died. Correctional officers were supposed to check the Epstein every 30 minutes, but instead were surfing the Internet and sleeping on the job.
Federal prosecutors indicted those men on six counts of fraud for falsifying records to show they had, indeed, done their jobs properly. The indictment says the men “knowingly conspired … to knowingly defraud” the government and “knowingly make and use a false writing” to carry out the fraud.
But broken cameras, suspiciously missing video, and dereliction of duty on the part of the guards, aren’t the only strange coincidences involving Epstein’s arrest, failed suicide attempt, and finally, successful one — if you believe the coroner.
Jail officials did not photograph Epstein’s body the way they found it, CBS’s 60 Minutes has reported, and key forensic evidence, celebrity pathologist Michael Baden told the program, points to murder, including Epstein’s broken hyoid bone, and the fact that the noose does not match the ligature mark on his neck.
If Epstein didn’t kill himself, the reason might be that he had compromising information on rich, powerful men who indulged their own perversions with his many sex slaves.
Image: Palto / iStock / Getty Images Plus
