New documents on the sordid crimes of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein expose the FBI in a frantic scramble to retrieve lost footage that fueled wild conspiracy theories about his death.
Attorney General Pam Bondi previously claimed that a video taken outside Epstein’s cell the night he died in 2019, released by the Justice Department last July, was missing the minute between 11:59 and midnight because of a nightly reset of the prison’s surveillance equipment.
“There was a minute that was off that counter, and what we learned from Bureau of Prisons was every year, every night, they redo that video,” she said at the time.
“Every night is reset, so every night should have that same missing minute,” she added. “So we’re looking for that video as well, to show it’s missing every night.”
That was not true, however. Following rabid speculation over the summer about assassinations and cover-ups, Congress eventually released a full version of the same video footage in September, blowing Bondi’s claim clean out of the water.
Fresh disclosures from the latest tranche of Epstein files, first reported by CBS on Wednesday, suggest the MAGA attorney general had in fact accepted an otherwise speculative assessment relayed by an FBI section chief.
“The Video Specialist theorized the NiceVision systems at this time required time to write files a caused a real time delay in what is recorded resulting in a gap of time not recorded right before midnight,” the official wrote in a summary.
“The Video Specialist was unable to test the accuracy of the theory,” he added.
Other documents contained in the files now reveal how the embarrassing blunder appears to have come about.
They suggest that back in June 2024, the FBI granted permission for one of their agents to destroy a master recording of tapes from the Manhattan Correctional Center after it was deemed “no longer pertinent” to their inquiries.
“As this case was already closed and [redacted] concurred on 08/26/2024 with agency evidence handling procedures, authorization was granted to destroy Item 1B60,” another agent wrote in a February 2025 account of its deletion.
“Per FBI policy, if an evidence item remains undisposed, the investigative case file must remain open,” they added, further justifying the rationale for destroying the master tape.
The Justice Department later embarked on a frantic scrabble to reconstitute the footage, splicing together source clips that in turn resulted in the “missing minute” version released last July.
“The effort involved obtaining another copy of the footage that remained stored across two files on a NiceVision digital video recorder, the system used in the jail,” CBS reports, citing a “high-level overview” of the restoration process contained in the Epstein files.
“On May 21, 2025, an agent used a screen capture tool to re-record the footage from NiceVision,” the outlet goes on. “But 62 seconds of footage couldn’t be captured, leaving a gap from 11:58 and 58 seconds, to 12:00.”
It remains unclear how the full version of the video, released later in September, was eventually retrieved. That footage suggests nothing unusual happened in the previously missing video gap the night of Epstein’s death.
The Daily Beast has contacted the DOJ and FBI for comment on this story.
