Yelling At Us Over The Epstein Files Only Means That We’ll Keep Talking About The Epstein Files

In every single criminal trial in this country, whether the crime is petty theft or murder or anything in between, there are very clear standards that deal with video evidence. In particular, if the government wants to introduce video evidence, they have to provide all of the available footage that they have. It’s a pretty intuitive concept. So if someone robs a convenience store, and the police recover surveillance tapes from the store, then they need to turn those tapes over to the defense. The prosecution can’t modify the tapes in any way. They can’t splice different tapes together. They certainly can’t delete anything. They have to provide the raw, unedited footage to the defense team. And on top of that, they have to verify that the tapes are authentic, and that they haven’t been tampered with, by establishing a sworn chain of custody. This is about as basic as it gets. Every judge in the country  — even Ketanji Brown Jackson — can grasp this very straightforward concept. You can easily get a case thrown out of traffic court if they won’t give you all of the relevant footage they have.

On the other hand, when it comes to the single most-watched sex trafficking case in the history of the United States, this rule apparently does not apply. You can forget about “chain of custody.” And you can forget about obtaining raw footage as well. Instead, in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the DOJ produced a video that was clearly manipulated. As we’ve discussed previously, WIRED Magazine found that the footage from outside Epstein’s jail cell — which the DOJ claimed was “raw” footage — had actually been edited and saved multiple times back in May of this year. Specifically, “the file was assembled from at least two source clips, saved multiple times, exported, and then uploaded to the DOJ’s website.” Additionally, viewers noticed that there was a glitch when the timer in the footage moved from 11:58 to 11:59 p.m.; it seemed to jump ahead to midnight.

None of this was initially explained or disclosed by the DOJ, which again, referred to the footage as “raw.” Of course, the reason that the DOJ claimed the footage was “raw” is that they understand, as most people do, that any edits — for any reason — would immediately raise a lot of questions. There should be no need to save the file multiple times, or to combine clips. They could’ve just posted everything they had, and let the public sort it out. But the DOJ didn’t do that. It’s possible they were hoping that no one would look at the metadata, or study the videos closely.

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If that was the plan, it didn’t last very long. After the footage was posted, and Wired Magazine noticed the problem, Pam Bondi had to come up with a justification for all of the discrepancies. What she said, ultimately, is that the security system in the jail resets every night for around a minute. Therefore, we were told, there was nothing nefarious about the missing footage. It’s just a fact of life that, in one of the most secure prisons in the country, we can’t design a camera system that stays online 24/7. That’s beyond our capacity. We can land a man on the moon, but we can’t prevent the cameras from shutting down every night, just long enough to maybe allow someone to get murdered. We also can’t make sure there’s more than one functioning camera in the vicinity of this cell block.

Already, this was an unsatisfactory explanation. The DOJ didn’t actually provide proof that the system needs to go offline for a minute every night. Bondi just claimed it was normal, and we were all supposed to accept it. She also didn’t say anything whatsoever about why the footage needed to be edited in the first place. Again, this wouldn’t fly in traffic court. And it definitely doesn’t pass muster when we’re talking about Jeffrey Epstein, who had the potential to implicate the most powerful people in the world.

And yet — somehow — the story just got much, much worse for Bondi and the DOJ. It turns out that, even after they were exposed for hiding relevant information from the public about this tape, they still haven’t come forward with the full story. So it falls on WIRED Magazine, a small internet publication, to fill in even more details. Here’s what they reported the other day: “Newly uncovered metadata reveals that nearly three minutes of footage were cut from what the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation described as ‘full raw’ surveillance video from the only functioning camera near Jeffrey Epstein’s prison cell the night before he was found dead. … Further analysis shows that one of the source clips was approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds longer than the segment included in the final video, indicating that footage appears to have been trimmed before release. It’s unclear what, if anything, the minutes cut from the first clip showed.”

Before we read on further in the article, there’s simply no way to justify this. It doesn’t matter if the extra 2 minutes and 53 seconds were irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if those extra 2 minutes and 53 seconds were duplicated in another video file. In this case, and in every other case, the duty of the government is to be transparent. It’s not to save people a very small amount of time when they’re watching an hour’s worth of video footage. Any government that’s functioning properly would understand this calculation immediately. Just give people all of the information you have.

The article continues: “The nearly three-minute discrepancy may be related to the widely reported one-minute gap—between 11:58:58 pm and 12:00:00 am—that attorney general Pam Bondi has attributed to a nightly system reset. The metadata confirms that the first video file, which showed footage from August 9, 2019, continued for several minutes beyond what appears in the final version of the video and was trimmed to the 11:58:58 pm mark, right before the jump to midnight. The cut to the first clip doesn’t necessarily mean that there is additional time unaccounted for—the second clip picks up at midnight, which suggests the two would overlap—nor does it prove that the missing minute was cut from the video.” Close quote.

In other words, we can’t say definitively what’s in the three minutes of footage that were cut. It’s possible there’s nothing of interest. But there’s one way that the government could provide some more clarity. They could simply dump all of the files on the DOJ’s website, without any editing whatsoever. At the moment, no one in the Trump administration can come up with a coherent justification for why this hasn’t been done. They also can’t explain why they haven’t released “Phase 2” of the Epstein files — or the “truckload” of “documents” that Pam Bondi said the DOJ had recovered in the last few months from the Southern District of New York. She says there are graphic depictions of children on the videos that she can’t release, but she hasn’t said anything at all about any of the “documents,” beyond telling us that they’re not important. Nor has she unsealed the search warrants or financial disclosures in the case.

Instead of getting any transparency here, the Trump administration is continuing to tell us that these materials are “boring” and that we shouldn’t care about them. Here’s how the president put it yesterday:

🚨TRUMP: "I don't understand why my supporters are so interested in Epstein. He's been dead for a long time. He was never a big factor. I don't understand the fascination…it's pretty boring stuff. I think only pretty bad people want to keep that going."pic.twitter.com/Ca4gWS80Cs

— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) July 16, 2025

Look, I know some people are annoyed at me for harping on this and criticizing the president, who in many other ways is doing a fantastic job. But I happen to believe that bringing sex predators to justice is extremely important. And I just can’t accept being blatantly gaslit by people in power, even if they’re people I otherwise support. In fact, ESPECIALLY if they’re people I otherwise support. So I must say that this answer from Trump is just simply awful. First, there’s the personal attack on anyone who asks questions, saying they’re “bad people.” That’s always a winning argument. If you want to convince millions of skeptical people that their leaders are lying to them about their behavior, then the best approach is to mock them. Works every time. Then there’s the implication that the Epstein files are “boring.” Well, in that case, release everything. Bore us to death. Then the story’s over, and everyone can go on with their lives. The 9/11 report was something like 600 pages. Parts of that document were boring. Almost no one actually read the entire thing. But it was still very important that the 9/11 report was written.

It’s extremely confusing, to put it mildly, to see the president of the United States take the opposite position. He says he doesn’t understand why people care about Jeffrey Epstein, as if it’s some kind of moral failing on our part. Yes, why would anyone care about some of the most powerful people on the planet spending time on a sex trafficker’s private island? Who could possibly be concerned about the possibility that a cabal of pedophiles and perverts is running entire countries and major corporations?

This is where the comparison to RussiaGate comes in, and it’s probably the worst part of the answer you just heard. RussiaGate was a disaster for this country precisely because we didn’t get the whole story. RussiaGate was premised on lies and distortions, at every stage. If Donald Trump made a joke at a rally, the media interpreted it as a coded message to Putin. They pretended he had a secret computer in Trump Tower that was communicating with Moscow. They said there was a “pee tape.” They claimed Russian hackers were being housed at a non-existent Russian consulate in Miami. They claimed Trump had weakened the GOP’s platform on Russia, even though the opposite was true. When Hunter Biden dropped his laptop off at a repair store, full of incriminating evidence about Joe Biden’s influence peddling operation, the media blamed that on Russia too. And on and on. RussiaGate was an utter fraud. And to the extent it was successful, it worked because the media (and the Obama administration) repeatedly lied to us. They didn’t give us information. Instead, they lied to our faces for the better part of a decade.

With Epstein, we want the opposite response from the media and the government. We want total transparency. At the end of his answer, Trump talks about filtering the documents so that we only obtain “credible” information. But that’s not the job of the government. Their job is to give us whatever information they can. Once they start assessing “credibility,” they give themselves a license to hide incriminating information. And there’s no reason to grant the government that license — no matter which political party is in charge.

That’s what makes the Democrats’ sudden interest in the Epstein files so galling and intolerable. They’re obviously turning this into a dumb partisan issue, when it isn’t one. We talked about this a bit yesterday. All of a sudden, after years of complete disinterest in the entire topic, Democrats are suddenly clamoring for the release of the Epstein files — or at least, they’re publicly pretending to want the Epstein files to be released. Here’s Adam Kinzinger, for example. He’s essentially a Democrat at this point: “EVERY, and i mean EVERY Republican incumbent or candidate or even anyone THINKING about running as a Republican for even dog catcher needs asked over and over and over about Epstein.”

This is a guy who spent his only significant time in Congress — the only time people knew who he was — screeching hysterically about elderly women and a “Q Shaman” walking around the Capitol Building on January 6th. That was the issue he claimed to care about. But no one actually cared about January 6th, so the whole plan backfired. So now that he’s out of office, he’s demanding that everyone talk about Epstein — an issue he didn’t seem to care about until this week.

It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. Neither party — Democrat or Republican — wants to see the full, unredacted release of the Epstein files. At a minimum, we can assume that top donors of both parties are implicated in some way. So they both want to neutralize this whole issue as quickly as they can. For Democrats, that means turning the Epstein files into yet another partisan football. They’re going to make performative efforts to get the files released, even though they know it’ll never work. For example, here’s Axios’ reporting from yesterday: “House Republicans on Tuesday voted down another Democratic procedural maneuver aimed at forcing the Justice Department to release documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. … Democrats’ procedural motion would have scuttled the GOP’s legislative agenda for the day in favor of the bill, making it difficult for Republicans to vote for it. … It came after Republicans on the House Rules Committee voted Monday night against attaching the Epstein language to a broader cryptocurrency and defense funding vote.”

Specifically, that “broader cryptocurrency vote” involved legislation that could’ve paved the way for a “central bank digital currency,” as well as restrictions on cryptocurrency ownership. Whatever you think of this bill — although it seems to be a pretty terrible idea — the fact remains that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Jeffrey Epstein. So Democrats are using this whole issue to play very transparent political games. That’s how seriously they take child sex trafficking.

But ultimately, if we’re being honest, the problem here goes back to the White House. They’ve given the Democrats this opening by bungling the situation so badly. The Trump administration seems mystified (or is acting that way) by the anger from the base. But the Epstein scandal isn’t happening in a vacuum. We haven’t seen any high profile or powerful people held accountable for their crimes. No one’s even been fired, let alone arrested, for allowing an assassin to almost kill Trump last year. Trump was elected in 2016 on a promise to “lock her up.” So when do we start locking people up? Trump himself has spent 10 years calling out many different crimes and scandals. Just this past weekend, he was talking again about the rigged election in 2020. Why hasn’t anyone been arrested or charged for any of this? What about the people who lied about the COVID shot? What about the people who funded the BLM riots in 2020? What about the cabal of unelected bureaucrats who were using Joe Biden’s autopen to sign pardons and executive orders, effectively seizing control of the federal government?

The New York Times just uncovered emails from Biden officials in which they made executive decisions to sign certain documents: “Mr. Zients hit ‘reply all’ and wrote, ‘I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons.'” That’s a reference to Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff. That’s a sentence that no government official — other than the president — should ever write. The chief of staff does not have the authority to use the president’s signature to pardon people. But that’s exactly what happened.

That’s not to say that digital signatures shouldn’t be allowed. Various outlets, including NBC News, have tried to claim that conservatives are attacking the idea of digital signatures. But that’s not the case. If Joe Biden had said, “Use my autopen to approve these pardons,” there would be no story. But that’s not what happened. Instead, a bunch of aides got together, said they “heard” Joe Biden authorize certain things. And then, solely based on their claims about what Joe Biden wanted, they used his signature.

Republicans are saying this is a major scandal. I agree that it is. So then who will be held responsible? Who will be punished? Republicans are constantly “investigating” things. But nobody is ever punished at the end of it. Meanwhile, Democrats spent the last four years prosecuting Trump and throwing conservative activists and political advisers in prison. And now, even after the majority of Americans voted for transparency and justice, we’re not anywhere close to getting it.

That’s not going to work. It’s not what any Republican voted for in the last election. We want to see accountability. We want to know that even the rich and powerful will pay for their crimes. It hasn’t happened. And for a lot of people, understandably so, this Epstein stuff is the last straw. Give us the information you’ve been promising. Give us the information we’re entitled to. If you refuse to do that — if you insist on insulting us instead — then we’re facing a much worse outcome than Democrat control of Congress in less than two years. We’re also facing a total collapse of legitimacy in our country. You can only deny reality for so long before people decide they’ve had enough. And whatever donors or intelligence assets are being protected here, they’re not that important. They’re not worth risking a revolt. So give us the “boring” Epstein files. Publish all of the “uninteresting” footage you clipped out of those videos from Epstein’s cell block, for reasons that no one has bothered to explain. Otherwise, in the absence of transparency, people will come to their own conclusions. And when they do, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you won’t like what happens next.