Many had hoped the surveillance videos released from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City would provide answers to what happened to Jeffrey Epstein in 2019, the videos have only brought more questions.
CBS News reported the materials were released Dec. 23 by the Department of Justice as part of Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The footage has apparently contradicted prior statements about the prison’s surveillance system.
Epstein was found dead in his cell at approximately 6:30 a.m. Aug. 10, 2019, as a corrections officer was delivering his breakfast at the facility. Epstein was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
The city’s chief medical examiner ruled the death a suicide.
A few months later, then-Attorney General Bill Barr revealed he reviewed prison surveillance footage and no one entered Epstein’s cell area in the hours before his death, supporting the report Epstein died by suicide.
The FBI released that footage this summer, which CBS analysts determined there was not a clear view of Epstein’s cell.
The DOJ and FBI declined to comment at the time.
A 2023 report by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General stated that there were 11 cameras in the Special Housing Unit (SHU), 10 were not recording due to malfunctioning hard drives.
Only one camera inside the common area of the SHU was recording and it was positioned on an upper tier and showed only a part of the staircase that led to Epstein’s tier.
In the report, the DOJ’s inspector general said there was an additional camera covering a secondary entrance to the SHU. That footage was never released.
According to the report, said footage did not show anything revealing about Epstein’s visitors or his death.
According to internal DOJ emails included last week’s disclosure, the surveillance system only retain 30 days of footage.
This begs the question: Why do videos from July 5 exist at all?
One potential explanation, according to experts in video forensics who CBS News spoke with, if the system had excess storage capacity the old footage wouldn’t be overwritten. The footage outside of the 30-day window could be recovered.
“[The system] won’t overwrite anything until the space is needed,” Stacy Eldridge with Silicon Prairie Cyber Services said.
The new videos include footage from five more cameras. This includes several hours of footage from a camera previously reported as non-recording. This footage provides an unobstructed view of the primary entrance to the SHU and the stairs leading to Epstein’s tier.
There are four non-sequential one-hour videos this camera recorded on Aug. 12, 2019, two days after Epstein died.
Department of Justice correspondence states that the surveillance system was down from July 29 until Aug. 14.
This leads to the question of which cameras were functioning when Epstein died. The system could have been reconfigured so this camera was attached to a functioning DVR recorder, CBS News reported. Experts told the news outlet a wiring change was a logical explanation.
“There is a plausible explanation for it, but it’s just odd,” Nick Barreiro, a digital forensic expert with Principle Forensics, said.
“It fills in gaps that are obviously missing from the perspective of the other camera.”
