Epstein Files Show Pam Bondi Lied About Missing Minute

When the Department of Justice released prison footage from the day Jeffrey Epstein died, the public immediately noticed something suspicious: a one-minute gap in the video timestamp. When questioned about this discrepancy, Attorney General Pam Bondi offered an explanation that seemed implausable. The best explanaition available now is that Bondi misrepresented the facts primarily due to incompetence.

July 2025: The Missing Minute

When the DOJ released the prison footage from the day of Epstein's death, observers noticed that the timestamp showed a one-minute gap—the video jumped from one time to another, with 60 seconds unaccounted for (skip to 4:16:22). This immediately raised questions about what happened during that missing minute and why the gap existed.

When pressed on the matter, Pam Bondi provided this explanation on July 8, 2025:

So, every night the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing.

This statement was meant to suggest it was a routine technical artifact of the video system, something that happened every single night without exception. On July 29, CBS published a detailed article explaining the discrepancies and problems with the jail videos and Bondi's 'video reset' explanation.

Sept 2025: New Video, New Questions

New footage was eventually released in September 2025 which included the missing minute. CBS news published a story on September 3, 2025, noting at the time that the new footage was still not the raw footage:

The newly released version does raise questions. The files made public by Congress are missing metadata — underlying coding that would help confirm they are in fact raw exports. Video experts note that the quality in this new version is far lower than the version previously released by the FBI.

According to the Guardian, the footage itself in the new video contained 'nothing out of the ordinary.'

Change in Leadership at CBS News

In October 2025, Paramount Skydance's acquired the Free Press from Bari Weiss for $150 million and appointed her as the first-ever editor-in-chief of CBS News.

February 2026: Old Memo, Mystery Solved?

In February 2026, CBS posted a new story story titled "Mystery of the Missing Minute from Epstein Jail Video Solved." Although "The FBI has never offered a public explanation of how it ended up releasing a video with a gap in footage," the article reports on a recently released FBI email containing a 'high-level overview' of what happened with the video footage. The email is dated July 17, 2025 and I will summarize what amounts to the 'official story' here:

1. The FBI requested the video files from the MCC on Sep 23, 2019, approximately 6 weeks after Epstein's death on August 10.
2. Because the time span requested covered two 24-hr periods, two video files were uploaded from MCC.
3. The DVR system at MCC failed to boot on Oct 4, 2019 so no more exports were possible.
4. Starting May 21, 2025, the FBI used a tool called OBS Studio to capture a screen recording of the two videos playing in a 'NiceVision' player. According to the memo,

When the video was played in the player the file ended at 11:58:58 and starts over at 12:00:00 on 09 August 2019. The video specialist theorized the NiceVision systems at this time required time to write files and caused a real time delay in what is recorded resulting in a gap of time not recorded right before midnight. The Video Specialist was unable to test the accuracy of his theory.

5. On May 23, resulting 2 screen recording was sent to 'New York' (presumably OTD/WFO).
6. Because OTD/WFO was asked to provide a "publicly viewable video that could be released to and played with ease by the public, not a proprietary player," an OTD Video Specialist wanted to merge the two videos into one file using Adobe Premiere. Because Adobe Premiere did not work with the video file format that the screen capture was created in, the Specialist used a command line program ("FFmpeg") to convert the files to a format that Adobe Premier could work with.
7. The discrepancy in the length of the videos and the length of the video indicated in some meta data was due to extra padding at the start and end of the screen recordings, which was later trimmed with the videos were combined.
8. The aspect ratio was changed "to create a more natural appearance."

This memo does uses a lot of words, but notably:

• It does not contain any detail about what file formats were actually used that were incompatible with Adobe Premiere,
• It does not address the missing metadata previously mentioned by CBS,
• It does not answer why even the new footage is still not the actual 'raw' footage,
• It does not explain why Pam Bondi told the public that "every night the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing," although the memo seems to imply that she merely parroted what a "video specialist" had "theorized.. but never tested."

Video from 7/19/2019 Shows No Missing Minute

While reviewing the most recent Epstein files on the DOJ website, I noticed a video with a familiar camera angle.

The timestamp shows it was the same camera recording the month prior to Epstein's death. According to Pam Bondi's original explanation, this footage should also show a one-minute gap at the same point in the timestamp sequence. However, it doesn't.

According to the FBI Email, this could not have been exported from the DVR system after October 2019. Although the FBI Email also implies that only 2 days worth of video were requested from MCC ("The requested time spanned over two separate files starting at and ending at midnight"), The July 2019 footage suggests a more plausible scenario where the FBI requested all the MCC footage in bulk, including for the weeks prior to Epstein's death, for example.

If the FBI Email's narrative is to be believed, why would they request such a narrow window from MCC? Did they request the larger batch before or after? If they requested the larger batch before, why would they re-request a narrow window? If their very first request for the video was 6 weeks after Epstein's death, why did they wait so long?

Important Disclaimer: Not a Smoking Gun

It's crucial to be clear about what this evidence does and does not prove. This is not a "smoking gun." This evidence does not prove that "Epstein didn't kill himself" or that there was foul play. What the evidence does show, unambiguously, is that Pam Bondi lied when she claimed that "every night should have the same minute missing." Maybe she was misinformed by a "video specialist" who "theorized" about the missing minute, but that doesn't change the fact that her statement was false.

Lastly, it feels strange that CBS News would publish a story titled "Mystery of the Missing Minute from Epstein Jail Video Solved," and then present an internal FBI email that doesn't actually solve the mystery, but rather raises more questions and leaves key details unaddressed. In 'normal' times, this could be seen as a clerical hiccup or minor embarassing mistake. In the context of the Epstein case and Bondi's DOJ, it would seem imprudent to give this administration the benefit of any doubt.