File 65 - Dead a Day Early

A DOJ press release announcing Epstein's death was dated August 9, 2019, one day before he was found dead. The document carried a placeholder release number and omitted the phrase 'apparent suicide.' An FBI 302 describes staff creating a decoy body from boxes and sheets to divert media.

The U.S. Attorney who signed it was removed within a year.

Sources for this episode are available at: https://epsteinfiles.fm/?episode=ep65

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The Epstein Files is an AI-generated podcast analyzing the 3.5 million pages released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA). All claims are grounded in primary source documents.

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Transcript

0:36

3 million pages of evidence. Thousands of unsealed flight logs. Millions of data points, names, themes and timelines connected. You are listening to the Epstein Files, the world's first AI native investigation into the case that traditional journalism simply could not handle. Welcome back to the Epstein Files. I'm looking at a document from the Gojefta release. It's a press release from the United States Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York. The letterhead reads, U.S. attorney Jeffrey S. Behrman. The title, Statement of Manhattan U.S. attorney on the death of defendant Jeffrey Epstein. The date on the document is Friday, August 9, 2019. Jeffrey Epstein was found dead on Saturday, August 10. And that's the immediate unavoidable discrepancy. The official timeline, you know, the one established by the Bureau of Prisons and later confirmed in DOJ reports. It states that Jeffrey Epstein was found unresponsive in his

cell at the Metropolitan Correctional center at approximately 6: 1:37

30am on Saturday morning, Saturday, August 10, 2019. And yet I am holding a document. Its source ID is EFTE 000013180, which is dated August 9, 2019. Friday. A full 24 hours earlier Friday. So our mission here is to reconcile a document dated Friday with an event that occurred on Saturday. We're not going to speculate. We are auditing the paper trail. And we have to, in any forensic audit, a date discrepancy of this magnitude on a document this critical. I mean, a death announcement for a federal prisoner of this profile, it's a primary deviation. It's a red flag. It requires a full stop and line by line reconciliation. Absolutely. Okay, so let's begin with Section one, Exhibit A, the document itself. I want to be very, very precise about what we're looking at. This is file EFT00013180. I was released as part of the Department of Justice's compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. So this is an official government record. Visually, what are we looking at? It looks like a standard press release draft. It is. It has all the hallmarks. You see the official seal? Top left corner, it reads, United States Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York. And right below that, the name of the U.S. attorney at the time. Jeffrey S. Burma. Correct. Then we have the standard capitalized header for immediate release. And directly beneath that, the date, Friday, Aug. 9, 2019. And just to anchor the geography of the document for you, below that date, you have the contact information. James Margolin, Don Dearden, Nicholas Bias. Right. The public information officers for the SDNY this isn't a random memo typed up by an intern. It. It's a formatted prepared statement ready to go. Let's move from the header to the body text because this is where the timeline completely collapses on itself. I want to read the first sentence verbatim. Quote. Earlier this morning, the Manhattan Correctional center confirmed that Jeffrey Epstein, who faced charities brought by this office of engaging in the sex trafficking of minors, had been found unresponsive in his cell and pronounced dead shortly thereafter. End quote. Okay, stop right there. Earlier this morning, if this document was typed, drafted, created on Friday, August 9, as the date header explicitly states, then earlier this morning can only refer to one thing. The morning of Friday, August 9th. Right. The logical question then is, was Jeffrey Epstein dead on the morning of Friday, August 9? And the documented answer is no, he was not. On Friday, August 9th, Jeffrey Epstein was alive. We know from other records he was meeting with his legal team that day. He was in his cell in the special housing unit of the McCarthy, very much alive. The death event, the actual discovery of the body that occurred the following morning, Saturday, August 10th. So we have an official government document that claims a death occurred earlier this morning, but it's dated today when the subject was verifiably still alive. And look at the verb tense. You read it. Had been found, pronounced dead. Past tense. It's the past perfect tense. It describes a completed action in the past. It is not written in the future tense. It's not a conditional statement. It doesn't say, in the event of the defendant's death, this statement shall be released. Exactly. It's not a contingency plan in that sense. It is written as a factual report of an event that has already concluded. So if this were say, a break glass in case of emergency draft, why would you phrase it as a past event and on the wrong day? It doesn't add up. That is the core anomaly. Standard crisis communication protocols, you know, they often involve pre drafting statements. That's not unusual for likely scenarios. A death in custody, a major indictment, what have you. But those drafts are. They're very different. They usually leave the date and time blank. Or they use bracketed placeholders like date and time. They do not typically assign a specific concrete date, Friday, August 9, and then describe a future event as having already happened earlier this morning. It's a logical contradiction. There is another marker on this document that points to its status. We need to look at the very bottom of the page. The press release number. Ah yes, it reads 19 xxx, 19 xx. Break that down. For us. What does that signify in DOJ terms? The Department of Justice and specifically the U.S. attorney's offices, they use a sequential numbering system for all their press releases. It's for tracking and archival. The 19 is the year. The 19 corresponds to the fiscal or calendar year, in this case, 2019. The numbers that follow the dash, they represent the sequential order of that release for that year. So 19,001 would be the first press release of 2019, 19,002 the second, and so on. Precisely so. The presence of XXX is a standard placeholder. It's internal shorthand. Meaning what? It indicates that the document has been drafted, maybe even internally approved for its content. But it has not yet been entered into the final release log. It hasn't been assigned its permanent unique sequence number, which confirms this is a draft. It confirms without a doubt that it is a pre release version. It was created before the final administrative step of issuance. Okay, so let's put the pieces on the table. We have a draft press release announcing a death. The draft is definitively dated Friday, August 9th. The death itself happened Saturday, August 10th. The draft uses the placeholder 19xxx. Correct. This leaves us with really two distinct possibilities for how this document came to be. Possibility 1 is simple clerical error. The typo theory, if you will, meaning a staff member drafted this on Saturday morning, August 10th, at after the death was known, but their computer's calendar was wrong. Or the template auto populated the previous day's date. Or they just manually typed a 9 instead of a 10. It's the most benign explanation, a simple mistake under pressure. But there is a serious problem with the typo theory. When you look at that phrase again earlier this morning. Exactly. If you are writing on Saturday morning and you write earlier this morning, that makes perfect sense. The death happens Saturday morning. But if you also type Friday, August 9, at the top of that same document, you are creating a record that explicitly claims that death happened on Friday. It's internally inconsistent, which leads to possibility two, the preparation theory. This theory posits that the document was created exactly when it says it was, on Friday, August 9, in anticipation of an event. In anticipation of an event that was expected or at least seen as highly probable to happen soon, maybe over the weekend. And if that is the case, the use of the past tense had been found. Unresponsive is. Well, it's chilling. It suggests that the narrative of the death was already constructed. It was already written down before the man's heart had even stopped beating. Let's move to section two. We need to do a comparative forensic analysis of the text itself. We have this document, EFTO00013180, the draft. And we also have the official press release that was actually issued to the public on Saturday, August 10th. Right. And the final version, the one that went out, it carried a finalized number, not 19 xxx. It was. And it had the correct date, August 10th. But a side by side text comparison reveals a critical deviation in the narrative itself. There's a missing phrase in the draft, isn't there? A very important one. In the official release from Saturday, the one the world saw, the text specifically mentions apparent suicide. It frames the death within that specific context from the very beginning. And in EFT00013180 year, the draft dated Friday, the phrase apparent suicide does not appear. It's not there at all. It's entirely absent, completely absent. The draft states only that he was found unresponsive and pronounced dead. That's it. It's a statement of fact without a stated cause. That is a significant discrepancy in the fact pattern being presented to the public. It's massive. If we follow the logic of the preparation theory that this was written on Friday, it implied something very specific. It implies that while the event of death was anticipated, the method or cause of death was either not yet decided, not yet known, or. Or perhaps the initial plan was to leave it deliberately ambiguous, found unresponsive. That's a very neutral phrase. It covers everything, doesn't it? A heart attack, a stroke, an assault, suicide. It's a catch all. It's a narrative shell. That's a good way to put it. It's a shell narrative. It establishes the core fact, death, without committing the U.S. attorney's office to a cause that might later be contradicted by a medical examiner. Let's look at the quote that's attributed to U.S. attorney Jeffrey Berman in. In this Friday draft. I'll read it again. Today's events are disturbing and we are deeply aware of their potential to present yet another hurdle to giving Epstein's many victims their day in court, today's events are disturbing. Again, totally generic. That phrase works for any cause of death. And then it continues. To those brave young women who have already come forward and to the many others who have yet to do so, let me reiterate that we remain committed to standing for you. And our investigation of the conduct charged in the indictment, which included a conspiracy count, remains ongoing. And that entire paragraph is functionally identical to what was released on Saturday. The focus is on reassuring the victims and signaling that the broader conspiracy case will continue. But think about the utility of that statement. Yeah, it's pre packaged crisis control. Exactly. It works regardless of how he dies. If he dies of natural causes, it's disturbing. If he is murdered in his cell, it's disturbing. If he commits suicide, it's disturbing. The official response is the same. It's a prefabricated emotional and legal response to a death that, according to the date on the document, has not yet happened. It's pure crisis management. You can see the priority in this draft is not conveying the medical facts of the death. The priority is managing the public and legal fallout. It is a document designed to mitigate blowback from the moment the news breaks. And it was dated 24 hours before the body was even found. Which brings us right back to that central unresolved anomaly. Why are you creating a crisis management draft with a specific date for a prisoner who is supposed to be securely monitored in the special housing unit of a federal facility? To really understand the level of management that was going on here, we have to look beyond the paperwork. We need to look at what happened on the ground immediately after the body was found. This wasn't just about managing a press release. It was about managing the physical event itself. We're Moving to Section 3, the decoy body operation. And for this, the Source is an FBI 302 interview summary. It's dated August 12, 2019. So this is two days after the death. While the details are still fresh, let's clarify for the record what an FBI 302 is. An FBI 302 is the standard official form that FBI agents use to report or summarize the interviews they conduct. It is the raw data of an investigation. It's not an agent's opinion. It is a formal record of what a witness stated. This specific 302 details the sequence of events regarding the transport of Jeffrey Epstein's body from the MCC to the office of the Chief Medical examiner at the ocme. Yes. And the witness who was interviewed details a high level of coordination between the MCC staff and the ocme. The background here is that the media presence outside the MCC was already enormous. Photographers, TV crews, reporters, all gathered on the street. And the 302 describes an act of deliberate deception. It does. In very clear terms. According to the interview summary, MCC staff utilized boxes and sheets to construct a shape on a gurney that resembled a human body. They literally built a fake body. A prop. They constructed a decoy. This decoy was then placed on A gurney covered and loaded into a white vehicle, which was either an OCME vehicle or an authorized transport van. And the purpose of this decoy? To draw the press. The white vehicle departed the sally port of the mcc. The media swarm, assuming the body was inside that vehicle, immediately followed it, creating a motorcade. And while the media was chasing the decoy, what about the actual body? The 302form states that Jeffrey Epstein's actual body was transported in a separate black vehicle. It departed the facility after the decoy and went unnoticed, or at least unaccompanied by the media circus. This isn't just a spontaneous decision. This requires a significant level of operational coordination. Of course, you have to build the prop. You need to have two separate vehicles ready. You have to time the exits perfectly to ensure the deception works. It implies a command structure that is actively managing the media narrative in real time on the ground. This is not standard procedure for a typical inmate. Death, is it? Is the construction of decoy bodies using boxes and sheets part of the Bureau of Prison's standard operating procedure? That's the question. No, it is not. This is a profound deviation from any standard protocol. It suggests that the handling of Jeffrey Epstein's death from the moment he was found was being treated as a high value, high security, almost intelligence style operation. So let's connect this back to our primary document, EFAA 00013180. Both the press release draft from the day before and the decoy body operation from the day of demonstrate the exact same character, preparation, premeditation of the narrative. One controls the official story, the other controls the visual story. Precisely. The draft press release controls the paperwork, the official government statement. The decoy body controls the optics. The paparazzi shots on the front page of the New York Post, they are two sides of the same coin. Total narrative management. They were managing the optics of his death before they even had a confirmed cause of death from the medical examiner. They were managing the entire event. And the August 9th press release draft suggests they began managing it as early as Friday. So let's look at the environment where this event took place, the operational environment at the mcc. We need to contextualize how this death became physically possible in the first place. For this, we're referencing two primary sources. The indictment against Tobin Oel and Michael Thomas, the two guards on duty that night, and the subsequent DOJ. Office of the Inspector General report number 23085 set the timeline for us. The night of Friday, August 9th, into the morning of Saturday, August 10th. Okay. Tova Knoll and Michael Thomas were the two correctional officers assigned to the overnight shift in the special Housing unit, the shu. This is the most secure part of the jail. Jeffrey Epstein was in cell A3. And what were their specific documented failures? The indictment charges them with conspiracy and crucially with falsifying federal records. Specifically the SHU count slips. Guards in that unit are required to physically walk the tier and check on each inmate at 30 minute intervals. And on the night of August 9th, what did they do? The indictment states, and this is backed by video evidence, that no rounds were conducted for approximately eight consecutive hours

from roughly 10:30pm Friday night to 6: 16:22

30am Saturday morning when Epstein was found. An eight hour gap. Total darkness in a high security federal unit. Correct. But if you were to look at the official records, the logbooks, they were filled out. Noel and Thomas signed multiple entries claiming they had performed the required counts. So the paperwork said, all is well. Procedure followed. The reality was, nobody is looking. Precisely. They falsified a federal record to cover an eight hour gap in surveillance on the most high profile inmate in the country. But hold on. There are cameras in the shu. Even if the guards are asleep, the cameras are still recording. That's the backup system. And this is why we turn to the DOJ. OIG report 23085. The Inspector General's office conducted a deep analysis of the video surveillance system in the SHU for that specific night. And what did they find? The report confirmed specific and let's say, convenient camera malfunctions. There were hard drive failures. The camera system that should have had a clear view of Epstein Celtir had recording gaps. The data was unrecoverable. So let me get this straight. You have the human failure. Two guards falling asleep or surfing the Internet and then faking their logs for an entire eight hour shift? Yes. And simultaneously you have a technical failure. The specific camera system that would have recorded everything malfunctions. That's what the record shows. What is the statistical probability of these two independent security systems failing at the exact same time? Well, in a systems engineering context, this is what you'd call a catastrophic alignment. Redundancy is built into high security systems for a reason. It's to prevent this very scenario. If the human fails, the camera captures it. If the camera fails, the human is supposed to observe it. But here, both fail. For both to fail simultaneously during the precise eight hour window that ends with a high profile death, creates a statistical anomaly that is, to put it mildly, difficult to attribute to mere random chance. It creates a perfect opportunity window. An Eight hour blind spot in a place that's supposed to have no blind spot. Now we have to layer in one more piece of context. His suicide watch status. Right. This is critical. On July 23, 2019, about two weeks earlier, Jeffrey Epstein was found in his cell, semi conscious with injuries to his neck. He claimed his cellmate had assaulted him. The MCC administration treated it as a potential suicide attempt and he was placed on suicide watch immediately. Suicide watch means 247 constant observation by a dedicated officer. The light stays on in the cell and officer takes notes on his behavior every 15 minutes. It's maximum surveillance. But he wasn't on suicide watch when he died. No. On July 29, 2019, just six days after that incident, Epstein was removed from suicide watch by MCC officials and he was put back in the SHU, a regular cell. He was. And remarkably, on August 9, he was placed in a cell alone. His cellmate, who he had had since being taken off watch, was transferred out that day. August 9th, Friday, August 9th, the date on the press release. The sequence of events is absolutely critical to understand. July 29, he is removed from constant suicide watch. August 9, his cellmate is transferred out, leaving him alone. The U.S. attorney's office drafts a press release announcing his death. Night of August 9th, the guards stop their checks and the cameras fail. Morning of August 10, he is found dead. The removal from suicide watch created the possibility of death. It removed the 247 human surveillance. Correct. The transfer of his cellmate created the privacy for that death to occur. No witness inside the room. The sleeping guards and the broken cameras created the opportunity for that death. No witnesses outside the room. And the press release dated August 9th suggests the anticipation of that death. That is the convergence of the data points you have the administrative decisions, the physical opportunity and the bureaucratic preparation all aligning within a 24 hour period. Let's talk about the man whose name is on that preparation. Section 5, the signatory U.S. attorney Jeffrey S. Berman. Jeffrey Berman, a very respected figure. He was appointed as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The SDNY is often called the Sovereign District of New York because of its historical independence and its critical jurisdiction over Wall street and high level public corruption cases. And his name is right there on the letterhead of EFT 00000131 a zero statement of Manhattan US Attorney he was the lead prosecutor on the Epstein case. His office, his AUSAs brought the charges against Epstein in 2019. So what happened to Jeffrey Berman? We have to Fast forward to June 2020. This is less than a year after Epstein's death, while investigations into co conspirators were presumably still very active, on Friday, June 19, 2020, Attorney General Bill Barr's office issued a press release, a late night press release. It stated that Jeffrey Berman was stepping down from his position at the sdny. Stepping down. That sounds like a standard voluntary resignation. It sounds like it, except it wasn't. Just minutes after Barr's announcement, Jeffrey Berman issued his own extraordinary statement. What did he say? He said, and I'm quoting, I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was stepping down as United States Attorney. I have not resigned and have no intention of resigning, end quote. The public standoff. The Attorney General of the United states says a U.S. attorney is leaving. And the U.S. attorney publicly says, no, I'm not. It was unprecedented in modern DOJ history. A direct challenge. So what happened the next day, Saturday, June 20, 2020, Bill Barr sent a formal letter to Berman. It stated, quote, because you have declared that you have no intention of resigning, I have asked the President to remove you as of today. And he has done so, end quote. So he was fired. Forcefully removed. He was summarily removed from his post. President Trump at the time tried to distance himself, saying, that's all up to the Attorney General. But the removal was executed under presidential authority. Why does this matter to the Epstein file we're auditing? It matters because Berman was the signatory on the anomalous August 9th draft. He was the man whose office was overseeing the entire investigation into Epstein and more importantly, into Epstein's alleged co conspirators. His removal was sudden, it was forceful, and it was publicly contested. Now, to be clear, we cannot claim he was fired because of document EPO00013180. No, we absolutely cannot. We do not have a document, a memo or testimony linking his firing directly to the specific press release that would. But we can state as a documented fact that the man responsible for the investigation, the man whose name is on this anomalous draft, was purged from the Department of Justice in a highly irregular and confrontational manner. That is the documented fact pattern. He didn't leave quietly. He was forced out while his office's work on this case was still ongoing. Let's move to our final section. Section six, the audit. Conclusion. We need to synthesize these documents. We started this with EFT00000131, the dead a day early document. And after reviewing the other evidence, we really have three competing theories to explain its existence. Theory one is the error theory, it was just a typo. And in isolation, that's plausible. People make mistakes. But it requires us to either ignore the phrase earlier this morning, which creates a logical contradiction, or it just seems insufficient. And given the context of everything else that went wrong that night, Theory two, the content theory, which is that the document is factually accurate. If the document is accurate as written, if it was truly written on Friday and earlier this morning, refers to Friday morning, then it's describing a death that happened on Friday. But we have a body discovered on Saturday. This theory creates a conflict with the physical reality presented by the official timeline. It does, unless you want to entertain the idea that the death happened Friday and was concealed for 24 hours, which we have no documentation to spoil. Which leaves us with theory three, the preparation theory. And this theory seems to be the most consistent with the totality of the forensic evidence. The document was a template, a shell created on Friday. The thinking would have been, he is going to die this weekend. We need to be ready. Write the release, get it approved by Berman, leave the cause of death by blank for now. And if this theory holds, it implies foreknowledge. It implies that the death was a known probability, a probability so high that it warranted drafting an official press release on US Government letterhead a day in advance. And when you combine that single document with the removal of his cellmate on that same day and the earlier removal from suicide watch against recommendations and the simultaneous failure of the guards and the simultaneous failure of the cameras, and then the highly coordinated decoy body operation, the pattern begins to shift away from a series of unfortunate negligent acts and towards something that looks more like management. Negligence is random. Negligence is sloppy. This wasn't just sloppy. The paperwork was ready, the decoy was ready, the statement for the victims was ready. The omission of the phrase apparent suicide in that Friday draft feels like the final key. It really does. It suggests the narrative hadn't been finalized yet. If the plan was always for this to be a straightforward suicide, why not just type those two words on Friday? Their absence suggests that they were keeping their options open. Or that the cause of death was not yet a settled part of the plan. Exactly. Found unresponsive is safe, it's clean. It buys you time. So what we're looking at is a system that failed catastrophically to keep a man alive, but then succeeded perfectly in managing the announcement of his death. The operational security around the life, the guards, the cameras, the cellmate, it failed completely. The operational security around the news, the press release, the decoy body. It worked perfectly. That is the fundamental discrepancy. The failures were all on the inside, protecting the inmate. The successes were all on the outside, controlling the story. Which is a pattern consistent with an objective to close a file, not to protect an asset. We have audited the documents. EFT 00000131 Ageo exists. It is a part of the federal record. It is dated August 9th. And to this day no official explanation has ever been offered by the Department of Justice for why a death announcement exists dated a full day prior to the actual death. The official timeline states Jeffrey Epstein died on August 10th. The Department of Justice's own paperwork document EFT 0000131A0 has a start date of August 9th. And in a forensic audit, when the paperwork contradicts the physical inventory, you do not adjust the paperwork to fit. You investigate the inventory. The documents raise the questions. They don't answer them. You have just heard an analysis of the official record. Every claim name and date mentioned in this episode is backed by primary school. You can view the original files for yourself at Epsteinfiles fm. If you value this data first approach to journalism. Please leave a five star review wherever you're listening right now. It helps keep this investigation visible. We'll see you in the next file.