A shocking video purporting to show disgraced pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein taking his own life briefly appeared in a Department of Justice file dump on Monday before being swiftly deleted.
The grainy, 12-second clip appeared to show a man wearing orange prison gear on the floor of his cell, and the timestamp on the video was from 4.29am on August 10, 2019 – two hours before Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan cell.
The video immediately sparked confusion and was pulled from the public files shortly after its publication.
It has since emerged the video was a fake, computer generated simulation of Epsein’s death which was circulated on 4chan.
It had been flagged to investigators by a conspiracy theorist in Florida, which is how it ended up being part of the Epstein files.
One YouTube account posted the video in 2020, racking up more than 3,000 views before it was ultimately taken down.
The new drop of Epstein files on Monday comes days after as many as 600,000 pages were released on Friday afternoon to comply with a law passed by Congress in November that mandated the disclosure of all Epstein files.
Trump had spent the first months of his return to the White House trying to keep them sealed.
He had for years promoted conspiracy theories about Epstein, but the case has turned into a political liability for him since his return to the White House in January.
Meanwhile, thousands more pages of Epstein files were withheld entirely and will be released to the public ‘at a later date.’
The Justice Department said it plans to release records on a rolling basis by the end of the year. It blamed the delay on the time-consuming process of obscuring victims’ names and other identifying information.
Former MAGA ally Marjorie Taylor Greene led Republican efforts demanding every single Epstein file be released to the public as an act of transparency.
She voiced her fury on Friday when it became clear that the Department of Justice had redacted huge swathes of information, including the names of high profile individuals featured in the documents.
‘The whole point was NOT to protect the ‘politically exposed individuals and government officials,’ Greene wrote on X in a scathing takedown of everyone involved.
‘That’s exactly what MAGA has always wanted, that’s what drain the swamp actually means.
Earlier on Monday, former president Bill Clinton demanded that Trump’s Department of Justice releases the rest of the Epstein files, after he was featured in multiple images in the initial drop.
The former president, in a statement through his spokesman, said ‘someone or something is being protected. We need no such protection.’
Clinton called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to ‘immediately release any remaining materials referring to, mentioning, or containing a photograph of Bill Clinton’.
He accused the DOJ of ‘selective releases to imply wrongdoing about individuals who have already been repeatedly cleared by the very same Department of Justice, over many years.’
Clinton further alleged that by not releasing the files, the DOJ would be confirming suspicions that its actions are about ‘insinuation’ and not transparency.
His statement comes as a group of 19 alleged victims of Epstein and his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell accused the government of missteps in the partial release of the files.
They accused the DOJ of violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act by ‘withholding massive quantities of documents’ and ‘failing to redact survivor identities.’
They argued that the failure to release the full trove of files and the DOJ’s alleged lack of communication about its actions ‘suggests an ongoing intent to keep survivors and the public in the dark as much as possible and as long as possible.’
Many of the records that were released by the DOJ last week – including photographs, interview transcripts, call logs, court records and other documents – were either already public or heavily blacked out, and many lacked necessary context.
There were few revelations in the hundreds of thousands of pages of records that have been released so far.
Some of the most eagerly awaited records, such as FBI victim interviews and internal memos shedding light on charging decisions, weren’t there.
If you or someone you know needs help, please call or text the confidential 24/7 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US on 988. There is also an online chat available at 988lifeline.org.
