By Jim Geraghty
Monday, May 19, 2025
For a while, it was one of the better jokes going around
— “Well, I’d better get to work, because like Jeffrey Epstein, this painting
isn’t going to hang itself.”
Epstein’s brother Mark has publicly doubted that the notorious financier killed himself.
A lawyer who met with Epstein days before his death says
Epstein told him he had not tried to kill himself two weeks earlier, that his
cellmate had given him a neck injury, and that he lied about it to avoid
getting a reputation as “a rat.” Epstein reportedly told a jail psychologist he had a “wonderful
life” and “would be crazy” to end it.
And of course, with a wide-ranging social circle of
powerful men and a thriving practice of securing underage women for coerced
sex, it was reasonable to believe that many powerful figures would have liked
to see him dead before he could destroy more reputations and implicate others
in his sordid deeds. (You can still buy “Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself” stickers on Amazon.)
An August 2019 survey by Certus Insights found 37 percent of
Americans believed Epstein committed suicide, 35 percent believed he was
murdered, and 29 percent were unsure. More Republicans thought he was murdered
(40 percent) than Democrats (32 percent) or independents (33 percent).
The notion that Epstein was murdered by secret sinister
forces is now treated as accepted truth within our pop culture:
·
In a Saturday
Night Live sketch last autumn, in a faux ad for a (real-life,
unrelated) New York City councilman named Harvey Epstein, a cast member playing
a hot dog vendor cheers, “Even Hillary couldn’t kill this guy! Good for him!
He’s a survivor!”
·
A November 2019 episode of
the CBS supernatural thriller Evil featured a psychic who
matter-of-factly declared Epstein was smothered with a pillow “because he could
hurt several powerful men.”
·
In a 2020 episode of The Good Wife, the
protagonists investigated Epstein’s death and came up with a twisted conspiracy theory involving cryogenics and
then-attorney-general William Barr.
In real life, Barr told the Associated Press in November 2019 that he
initially had his own suspicions about financier Epstein’s death “while behind
bars at one of the most secure jails in America” but came to conclude that his
suicide was, in his words, the result of “a perfect storm of screw-ups.”
Barr’s declaration did little to dispel the conspiracy
theories.
Now, nearly six years after the notorious financier died
in prison, the word from the two top officials at the FBI, appointed by
President Trump, is that Epstein did indeed hang himself.
FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino sat down
with Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures host Maria Bartiromo and
offered a clear, and seemingly final answer:
Bartiromo: You said Jeffrey
Epstein committed suicide. People don’t believe it.
Patel: Well, I mean, listen. They
have a right to their opinion, but as someone who has worked as a public
defender, as a prosecutor, who’s been in that prison system, been in the
Metropolitan Detention Center, who’s been in segregated housing, you know a
suicide when you see one, and that’s what that was.
Bongino: He killed himself.
Again, you want me to — I’ve seen the whole file. He killed himself.
During Patel’s confirmation hearing for the position of FBI
director, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana asked him, “Did Jeffrey Epstein
hang himself or did somebody kill him?” Patel answered, “Senator, I believe he
hung himself in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center.”
Later
on X, Bongino reiterated, “I was asked about some of the details
surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein case. I have reviewed the case. Jeffrey Epstein
killed himself. There’s no evidence in the case file indicating otherwise. I’m
not asking you to believe me, or not. I’m telling you what exists, and what
doesn’t. If new evidence surfaces, I’m happy to reevaluate.”
Back in 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector
General issued a 128-page report concluding severe staffing shortages, failures at managing
inmates at risk for suicide, issues with maintaining working security cameras
and a “widespread disregard of BOP policies and procedures.” The report charged
that the disregard for policies and procedures were “endemic throughout the
bureau nationwide.”
Inspector General Michael Horowitz appeared to address
the conspiracy theories when he concluded, “While we determined MCC New York
staff engaged in significant misconduct, we did not uncover evidence
contradicting the FBI’s determination there was no criminality in connection
with how Epstein died.”
Contrary to MCC and BOP policies
and procedures, Epstein was allowed to sleep on the floor, had extra blankets
and clothes. Photos of Epstein’s cell included in the report shows piles of
what appears to be orange clothes strewn about the floor and bed.
Epstein was also allowed to use a
jail phone the night before he died that was unmonitored, in violation of BOP
policy, and was not re-assigned a new cellmate despite previously attempting
suicide.
Epstein was also supposed to be
under watch for that prior attempt. But two correctional officers, Michael
Thomas and Tova Noel, who were assigned to guard Epstein overnight failed to
complete more than 75 mandatory checks on him. He was left in his cell
overnight, and only discovered dead at 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10.
As recently as February 7, Dan Bongino was hosting his podcast,
talking up Epstein’s connections to the Clintons, and declaring, “It’s time to
start overturning that rock, and seeing what’s underneath”:
I’ve been covering it for a long
time. The Jeffrey Epstein case, you do not know all the details of this thing,
I promise. There are a lot of really obviously powerful people. This part you
know, but the specific names, we may not. Including, I believe, the Clintons,
based on information I discussed yesterday, who are knee-deep in involvement
with Jeffrey Epstein, and no one can figure out what the level of entanglement
is. Jeffrey Epstein met with Obama’s fixer, his lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, who
was always the one in the middle of these Obama scandals. And we can’t figure
out why, what they’re hiding. Here’s Marsha Blackburn, who has been all over
this, she’s a senator [in] Tennessee, a Republican obviously. And she’s like,
“Hey, man. Is it time now? It’s time to start overturning that rock and seeing
what’s underneath.”
(Kathryn Ruemmler was President Obama’s longest-serving Whtie
House counsel and previously served as associate counsel to President Bill
Clinton.)
In other words, if there were any two figures who would
be intensely motivated to investigate and prove a plot by some sort of powerful
figure (particularly on the Democratic side of the political spectrum) to
murder Epstein in his cell and make it look like a suicide, Patel and Bongino
are the guys. They apparently have examined the existing case files and
concluded there is no evidence, or anything that warrants further
investigation.
A handful of lesser-known MAGA social-media influencers immediately
contended that Patel and Bongino were sellouts who were now complicit in a
coverup.
Those same individuals are also likely to be disappointed
by Patel and Bongino’s answers on the assassination attempts on Donald Trump,
and that there are no indications of any foreign involvement or a larger plot.
Bongino summarized, “In some of these cases, the ‘there’ you’re looking for is
not there”:
Bartiromo: I know you can’t talk
about any active investigation, and our viewers understand that. How come we
don’t have more information on the assassination attempts on President Trump?
Patel: There are two reasons. Two
open, ongoing prosecutions. So, two of the investigations are obviously closed,
because the individuals are dead, but there’s two live prosecutions. And so, we
can’t get ahead of the federal court case. A lot of that information will come
out in the federal court cases.
But we have personally invested
our time in making sure that we have looked at all the, any possible
international connections to terrorism and adversaries alike, and we’ve both
been down to Quantico. We’ve both done the laboratory testing, we’ve both seen
the explosives analysis, we’ve both seen the firearm and physically held it, we
are all in on these investigations.
Bartiromo: Are we going to be
surprised at what you learned?
Bongino: You know what, Maria?
Kash is not kidding, we’ve been personally briefed extensively on every single
detail, nugget, tendril of this case. One is actively in court right now, so
out of respect for the case, it’s probably more appropriate that I stay quiet
on that. However, I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m
going to tell you the truth, and whether you like it or not is up to you.
If there was a big, explosive
“there” there — given my history as a Secret Service agent, and my personal
friendship as a director does with the president, give me one logical, sensible
reason we would not have — if you can think of one, there isn’t. In some of
these cases, the “there” you’re looking for is not there. And I know people — I
get it, I understand. It’s not there. If it was there, we would have told you.
No doubt, someone out there on the Internet, with a “wall of crazy”
behind him, is feverishly typing, concluding that “the conspiracy” got to Patel
and Bongino — or perhaps that Trump was the mastermind behind the assassination
attempts on himself.
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