The “missing minute” from the surveillance video at the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center where Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019 may not be missing after all, CBS News has learned.
When the Justice Department and FBI released nearly 11 hours of footage earlier this month, the time code on the screen jumped forward one minute just before midnight, prompting questions about the one-minute gap. The video shows part of the area near the cell where Epstein was being held the night he died in what the medical examiner ruled a suicide.
A government source familiar with the investigation says the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice inspector general are all in possession of a copy of the video that does not cut from just before 11:59 p.m. to midnight of the night Epstein died by suicide in his cell.
What is unclear is why that section was missing when the FBI released what it said was raw footage from inside the Special Housing Unit the night Epstein died, Aug. 9-10, 2019. The recording came from what officials said was the only relevant video camera that was recording its footage in the unit. This video has been cited by multiple government officials as a key piece of evidence in the determination that Epstein died by suicide.
Epstein’s death, as with many aspects of his high-profile sex trafficking case, has become fodder for conspiracy theories. The missing minute added to the conjecture after the release of the video, when news organizations and amateur sleuths who reviewed the video quickly noticed that onscreen jump in the time stamp.
Attorney General Pam Bondi was questioned about the gap during a July 8 Cabinet meeting with President Trump. She said the missing minute was the result of a nightly reset of the video that caused the recording system to miss one recording minute every night, and attributed that information to the Bureau of Prisons.
“There was a minute that was off that counter and what we learned from [the] Bureau of Prisons was every year, every night, they redo that video,” Bondi said. The equipment was old — “from like 1999, so every night is reset, so every night should have that same missing minute,” she said.
Bondi said the department would share other video that showed the same thing happened every night when the video system reset. That video, however, has not yet been released.
Experts in surveillance video, including video forensic professionals, told CBS News that a nightly reset would have…
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