2w ago

The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out

www.wired.com

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. The video was released last week as part of the Trump administration’s commitment to fully investigate Epstein’s 2019 death but instead has raised new questions about how the footage was edited and assembled.

Archive: https://archive.is/wnxPx

69 comments

That makes a bit more sense. one minute was not quite enough to get in, string up a noose, put him in the noose, and get out; never mind the presumed struggle and/or drugging or whatever.
- I haven't really looked much into the layout or video (I tend to not like staring at corpses OR rapists), but assuming it is of the cell itself or the door right outside?
  A minute is more than enough time for a couple of blokes to get in, grab someone, put them in a blood choke, loop the noose, throw it, and tie a super quick knot. Hollywood likes people to think you can struggle against getting choked. An air choke where your oxygen supply is cut off? Sure, those can take a minute or two to kill someone. A blood choke where you put pressure on the artery? They are unconscious in less than 10 seconds (sometimes almost instantaneously) and they aren't going to wake up the moment you release. Similarly, ask any climber to tie a quick figure eight (or bowline if they are old or european) and they can do that blindfolded, in the rain, in like 10 seconds.
  So assuming even two killers? Yeah, a minute is more than enough time.
  That isn't to say that multiple minutes is not more likely. But the article has many caveats for why that isn't necessarily the case (overlap, basically) and there is already a massive push by fascists to somehow spin all of this as being Obama's fault. So be wary of easy gotchas that they can introduce and disprove.
  
  They are unconscious in less than 10 seconds (sometimes almost instantaneously) and they aren’t going to wake up the moment you release. Similarly, ask any climber to tie a quick figure eight (or bowline if they are old or european) and they can do that blindfolded, in the rain, in like 10 seconds.
  So assuming even two killers? Yeah, a minute is more than enough time.
  You, eh, ever try to lift 150-200 pounds of dead weight? while trying to make it look like that dead weight did it himself?
  it's not just the fight. It's not just the struggle. just for the record the camera was in the hallway outside and not in the room. a minute is barely enough time to get in, kill him, and get out.
  To also then string him up, and remove whatever you need to, to make it look like suicide? three minutes is pushing it, even with 2 guys- and remember, the more guys you add the more potential you have for some one talking.
  
  The camera view is not of the cell or even outside of it. It’s pointed at nearby cells and the FBI claims someone would have to walk past it to reach Epstein’s cell.
  
  Even so, it was dubbed as "raw".
  
  I love how everyone in your replies is all of a sudden an expert on hitmen and their parameters.
  Yes, a few minutes alone in a room with someone is long enough to kill them and make it look like something else. I'm as qualified as anyone else here (I've even seen a YouTube interview with an ex-professional hit man, so probably more so), so I can just say that and it becomes so.
  
  For a guy that doesn't like staring at corpses, you seem versed in how to make them?
  
  Similarly, ask any climber to tie a quick figure eight (or bowline if they are old or european)
  Yes, we all know the bowline. But I'm both old and European so I know them all, from the square knot with double slip releases (aka. tying your shoelace) to the mighty monkey's fist!
  
  In some martial arts classes in college, we messed around with chokes 1 day and I never went back. I was knocked out once, and when trying it on someone else for "a few seconds" to be safe I put my partner in a choke and it was eerily fast. They ragdolled on like a second. They were conscious but dizzy like 10 secomds later, and I was like "nope."
- I mean, it depends on how many people you have available. Five or six strong dudes could easily overpower him in like 10 seconds. Have another dude ready with a pre-tied noose, so all he has to do is throw it over a bar and pull it tight. Once Epstein is being bearhugged by like three dudes, getting him into the noose would be trivial.
  A minute would be tight, but if you keep cameras in mind and bum-rush him with a practiced team, it could be doable.
  
  More people involved the harder to keep secret though
- Sounds like a challenge!
  
  Frankly, whatever insanity it takes to peel MAGA away from Trump is fine by me at this point.
- I beleive the extra cut suggests overlap, not extra time. I.E. clip 1 running until 12:02 instead of 12, with clip 2 picking up at 12.
  This happens during resets sometimes to ensure footage isn't lost. I.E. you start recording on a second ffmpeg process before you stop the first. The missing minute is the part that matters, and overlap makes it even more plausible that missing minute was removed.
  
  I wouldn't be surprised if the missing end of the first clip was something like "NO SIGNAL", as the input resets and the encoding continues.
  The cut is a very reasonably explained outage with timing that is very consistent with mundane explanation, but very weird for a hypothetical murder.
  If I were in charge of surveillance footage covering up a conspiracy, I'd just fake the footage instead of trying to edit out the specific evidence. Seems weird to obsess over a gap in a video that seems hardly difficult to fake instead.
- Actually, the article seems to be saying that with the overlap, it’s still just 1:02 missing
Hmmm.
Funny. Almost like he didn't kill himself.
Alright, for arguments sake, let's give them the benefit of the doubt here. Let's assume that there was no one that entered or exited his room that night, that he killed himself alone in the room, that they released the tape in a good faith effort to show the truth to the world, and that, due to corruption or whatever unavoidable issue, those minutes were lost through no nefarious means and those missing minutes would have been as clean as the rest of the tape.... They're still morons for releasing it! How the fuck did they think that missing time would be interpreted!? They stoke conspiracy on the daily like it is their job with WAY less blatantly suspicious circumstances than this. Even if they weren't a bunch of evil fascists that are definitely trying to hide something, but just otherwise normal morons, they deserve the fallout of this for being that stupid.
- Lying and being wildly incompetent are like hallmarks of the Trump regime.
- It’s a loyalty test. MAGA is a cult, and all about believing obvious lies. The more egregious the lie believed, the more it locks people into the cult. Anyone with a weak faith in the cult who shows dissent can be purged.
It is darkly funny, on multiple levels, that thus far the best impediment to the Mechanazis is their own dumb fucking incompetence.
They certainly are not being thwarted by an “opposition” that is cowardly and craven, if not outright complicit.
- The absolute cowardice of the Democrat party is supremely laughably sad. The US is no longer controlled by a government. Just rich people. Maybe it always has been.
- It's especially funny that what's finally undoing them is a conspiracy theory. The whole MAGA movement is founded on conspiracies. Just before starting his run for President, Trump was the birther in chief, pushing the conspiracy that Obama was Kenyan. Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess.
Russia: "Accidentally falls out window"
USA: "Suicide when CCTV is 'malfunctioning'"
- Because we have a little thing called 'tact'
- Accidentally falls out a window that was made of reinforced glass and he crashed through it in ways that even a large man charging at it at full force would still have a hard time shattering.
  
  Like this?
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Garry_Hoy
  The glass didn't shatter.
It's all intentional, these are gangster tactics. You are supposed to cover up the assassination but not that well, so the message gets out, we can kill you if you talk and make it look like an accident/suicide whatever. That's why the sloppy editing etc.
- KGB tactics.
- This happened with the panama papers as well.
Man. It when from no video exists to missing clips pretty fast
Simple explanation. When all the guards simultaneously fell asleep, one of them accidentally cut the power to the security system.
You can’t expect the Justice Department to provide footage that was never recorded in a freak accident that is totally not suspicious at all. It’s not like Epstein had mountains of dirt on the wealthiest and most evil people on the planet doing unspeakably horrible things to innocent children.
We should all just accept this ridiculous story as true and let the rich evil people get back to doing… whatever it was they were doing. I’ve already forgotten
- Also don't mind that cellmate that got transferred out shortly before Epstein "killed himself". Such an unfortunate series of coincidences
  
  I would guess that most of the time when a prisoner kills themselves it's when they don't have a cellmate. A cellmate is probably likely to stop someone or to call the guards, rather than just watch someone die.
TIL it takes 3 minutes to murder someone and make it “look like a suicide”
- I mean, the last footage wasn't of his door, so you just need a few seconds to slip past the cameras each time
- You don't even need time around the cell for this. Just threaten with something that would be worse than suicide.
Don't worry about those 3 minutes, for real. The radical left would have you believe something bad happened during this, but the video was just so boring we wanted to save you the tedium of viewing it. This video is absolute proof nothing unsavory happened, so quit asking questions and don't forget to vote Republican in the primaries!
- You had me at “the radical left.”
So what is the research trail, to find who edited that video? Then, who asked for it to be edited?
- You mean MJCOLE~1? The editing seems to be to splice two distinct video files together to cover a contiguous period of time, but there is a gap of coverage, despite a potential overlap in the durations. Seems like a milquetoast "release one video" request and so someone did a quick edit to join the two video files together.
  The gap is between 11:59 and 12:00 AM, almost to the second. The explanation is the system restarts for maintenance at midnight, and that the missing minute was simply a normal gap in the system. Wired highlights that the pre-reset clip was long enough to more than cover the final gap, but they might have trimmed 'NO SIGNAL' sort of video that might have been in the recording as an artifact of the reset.
  Frankly, if they asserted that much control over the surveillance video as to edit it, they could have just as easily faked it. There's hours of nothing but static interior shot with nothing other than the timestamp to claim anything specifically. In a way making a big deal of the gap only bolsters the credibility of footage that really shouldn't be taken to provide evidence one way or another about anything.
Could this be just clever editing? Does it need to be even 3 minutes of missing footage if you just cut entry and exit of some individual and replace them with fake or repeat frames.
Whole missing minute thing could be distraction.
- Yeah, this I don't get, it's a video mostly (entirely for all I know) of a door with nothing happening except a timestamp. Seems supremely easy to fake if you were so conspiracy minded, while a gap between 11:59PM and 12:00AM seems both right when a scheduled outage would be and way too narrow and specific a timeline to carry out such a plan.
  A conspiracy that could edit a gap in the video is a conspiracy that could have faked the footage just as easily.
- More importantly, the video doesnt match the photos released in 2019. There is a difference in railing color, door and other differences. The video seems to be from a different location in the same building.
  https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/23-085.pdf
Didn't they find that the video was run at 1.01 speed, making it seem like there was more time missing than was actually missing?
- That would be less than a 2 second difference from the 3 minutes that was cut from the video.
  
  It was an eleven hour video run at 101%, not just three minutes. You can read about it here.
- Different issues. The 101% issue is that the released video is shorter than the time elapsed on the timestamps. The difference between timestamp and playback speed adds up over time to 7ish minutes iirc.
  This issue is that the video is made from two clips. One cuts out at 11:58:58 and the other immediately cuts in at 12:00:00, showing a 00:01:02 gap in the timestamps. Examination of the file shows details of the source clips, indicating that the first clip continued for multiple minutes after the cut. That would make it overlap with the second clip, which is played in its entirety.
I've not seen the footage but was there any video of him even tying a noose? Like I'm sure creating and tying up some sort of rudimentary noose to hang yourself must take at least 30 seconds depending on how quickly you're trying to do it.
- I haven't watched the video but it sounds like it doesn't actually show Epstein's cell. The camera shows an area someone would need to walk through to get to his cell.
And no one was shocked or surprised.

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