When reviewing the metadata on newly-released "full raw" security camera footage from outside the cell where billionaire sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein spent his last day alive, experts found something very odd: that it appears to have been manipulated.
As Wired reports, the allegedly "raw" video that the Justice Department just released — in tandem with the repeated claim that Epstein died by suicide, and a bizarre insistence that he did not have a "client list" — may add fuel to the conspiracy fire surrounding his death.
The 11-hour "full raw" surveillance video from the night Epstein died in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center back in 2019 is, notably, missing the key minute where the notorious financier purportedly killed himself. In the footage that was just released, there is no evidence that anyone entered or exited the cell where he died.
After Wired reporters and independent experts reviewed its metadata, however, a more complicated story emerged: that the video appears to have been modified from its initial form, likely using Adobe's Premiere Pro video editing software.
Specifically, those experts tell Wired that the DOJ's "full raw" video from Epstein's last half-day alive seems to have been assembled from two separate clips, and the whole file itself was saved multiple times before being exported and uploaded to the DOJ website.
As sketchy as those metadata modifications may be, Wired cautions that there's nothing contained within them to prove that the video was manipulated maliciously. But that's unlikely to stop certain conspiracy theorists from growing even more skeptical.
Take, for instance, Dan Bongino, the former Fox News talking head and longtime Epstein conspiracist who now serves as the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Earlier this week, NBC reported based on insider sources that Bongino is "out of control furious" and threatening to resign from his post and "torch" attorney general Pam Bondi over the way the DOJ has handled the case.
To be fair, those conspiracists have quite a lot to work with. Trump himself purportedly had a deep friendship with Epstein, who back in 2002 he called a "terrific guy" who "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." The two were photographed partying with at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in 2000. As the icing on the cake, Trump was also named in formerly-redacted files about the billionaire pedophile that a judge unsealed last year.
There's also a glaring question of hypocrisy. Trump repeatedly vowed on the campaign trail last year to declassify the so-called "Epstein Files," but has since taken to stridently defending Bondi and the DOJ's claims since the jail cell footage was released.
"Whatever your flavor of Epstein conspiracy is, the video will help bolster it," explained extremism researcher Mike Rothschild when speaking to the magazine.
According to Hany Farid, a digital forensics and misinformation researcher at the University of California, Berkeley who reviewed the footage for Wired, the apparent changes also open the DOJ up to new questions and potential legal implications.
As Farid told the website, the video's seemingly manipulated metadata suggests problems with its chain of custody — the complex evidence-handling procedures that law enforcement are required by law to painstakingly document.
"If a lawyer brought me this file and asked if it was suitable for court, I’d say no. Go back to the source. Do it right," the forensic expert said. "Do a direct export from the original system — no monkey business."
Thus far, neither Donald Trump's administration nor attorney general Pam Bondi, who oversaw the Epstein footage investigation, have responded directly to the concerns raised by Wired's reporting. In a tweet about the article, however, Hawaii senator Brian Schatz flagged the strangeness of the allegations.
"I am probably among the least conspiracy minded people you would ever meet," the Hawaii Democrat wrote, "but this is getting pretty nearly impossible to explain."
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