Federal prosecutors have claimed that surveillance video taken from outside Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell on the day of his first apparent suicide attempt has been permanently deleted.
The Herald gathered that the federal prosecutors made this claim on Thursday in a court filing.
Epstein, the disgraced financier who was facing federal sex-trafficking charges, was found semiconscious in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, in New York around 1:27 a.m. on July 23.
The prosecutors said that the video is now gone because MCC officials mistakenly saved footage from a different floor of the federal detention facility.
According to the court papers, “The MCC inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC and as a result, video from outside the defendant’s cell on July 22-23, 2019 no longer exists.
“After reviewing the video, it appeared to the government that the footage contained on the preserved video was for the correct date and time, but captured a different tier than the one where [the cell housing Epstein and his cellmate] was located because the preserved video did not show corrections officers responding to any of the cells seen on the video.”
The prosecutors maintained that FBI made the discovery last week while reviewing a copy of the video provided by MCC officials.