The release of prison footage of the night Jeffery Epstein died is not going to be convincing that he committed suicide and was not murdered in order to silence him.

I’m going to give you a little history to help you understand how conspiracy theories are created and sustained. When JFK was assassinated, it was captured on film by a regular citizen named Abraham Zapruder. He went home and watched what he had captured and was instantly horrified. It was absolutely gruesome. The relevant portion was only 26.6 seconds long and included 486 individual frames of film. The moment when the president’s skull exploded was captured in frame 313.

Frame 313. The frame that gave Abraham Zapruder nightmares, the frame he insisted be withheld from the public—a single frame of film that can be said to have changed American history and culture…

…Knowing that his home movie would have both historic and forensic value, Abraham Zapruder had three copies of his original film made for government investigators. He sold the rights to the original to Life magazine for a reported $150,000. Zapruder made clear Frame 313 gave him nightmares and he didn’t want to be the one to inflict them on the rest of America. Ultimately Life decided to withhold Frame 313.

Six days after the assassination, Life published many of the still frames, but not frame 313. Zapruder gave the other two copies to government investigators and kept the original for himself. When the Warren Commission published its report in 1964, it included frame 313, but it flipped its sequential order with frame 314. This reversed the direction of Kennedy’s head movement and gave the impression that the fatal shot came from the rear, where Lee Harvey Oswald was located, rather than the front. When J. Edgar Hoover was questioned about this in 1965, he claimed it was a simple printing error.

That’s largely how things stood for a decade. While a few people saw the film in the intervening years, it wasn’t until March 6, 1975, when ABC aired the whole Zapruder film on Geraldo Rivera’s Good Night America, that the public was exposed to it. The reaction was electric. The vast majority of viewers were left with the impression that it was impossible that Oswald had fired the fatal shot.

The public’s response and outrage to that television showing quickly led to the forming of the Hart–Schweiker investigation, which contributed to the Church Committee Investigation on Intelligence Activities by the United States, and resulted in the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded there had been a conspiracy involving more than one shooter, but they based this primarily on acoustical evidence that was later brought under some doubt. The movement of JFK’s head remained a contentious issue, but at least some experts testified that it was not inconsistent with a shot from the rear. Still, to the untrained eye and the vast majority of people, it doesn’t look that way.

In 1991, Oliver Stone produced the movie JFK, which focused on the 1968 trial of Clay Shaw who was prosecuted (and acquitted) by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison for being part of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy. As depicted in Stone’s film, Garrison made extensive use of the Zapruder film in his presentation to the jury, emphasizing that JFK’s head had snapped “back and to the left.” Once again, much of the public agreed that this precluded Oswald from being the lone assassin, and a new investigation was launched by Congress overseen by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).

This is probably the single most basic and easy to understand JFK conspiracy theory. Is the Zapruder film consistent with a fatal shot from the rear or not? If not, then there was more than one shooter and Oswald didn’t kill the president even if he attempted to do so. Back in 1963, a decision was made not to show the public this film. They were shown still shots, but not the crucial frame. When the Warren Commission published the crucial frame, a “printing error” presented misleading evidence that conveniently supported their theory that Oswald was the lone gunman.

In some sense, the government was successful in promoting the lone gunman theory, but lack of transparency and duplicity actually resulted in repeated demands to reopen the investigation over the next three decades. Assuming the lone gunman theory is correct, the government obviously should have done better in convincing the public. If there’s a solid scientific explanation for why Kennedy’s head moved “back and to the left,” then they should have led with that from the beginning.

The government has just repeated these mistakes with the Epstein footage. To begin with, the footage is taken from outside Epstein’s cell rather than inside it. So, for example, we don’t see Epstein hanging himself which would be conclusive. Instead, the point is to demonstrate that no one entered his cell. But there is no footage of Epstein’s cell door. The footage covers the common area and the elevator door. While this is helpful because it would presumably be difficult if not impossible to gain access to his cell without being captured exiting the elevator or crossing the common area, it is less than satisfactory. This is especially true because half the prison’s cameras were not working and a scheduled fix for the night before Epstein’s death was called off because “the technician could not access the necessary equipment.”

If all that is suspicious, a greater problem is that the digital clock on the screen of the released footage skips from 11:58:58 p.m. to 12:00 a.m., leaving a one-minute gap. Attorney General Pam Bondi claims that the prison video resets every night at midnight, so there’s a missing minute from every night of footage. What she actually said is a word salad:

“What was on that, there was a minute off the counter, and what we learned from [Federal] Bureau of Prisons was, every year — every night, they redo that video. It’s old, from like 1999. So every night the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing. So we’re looking for that video to release that as well, showing that a minute is missing every night. And that’s it on Epstein.”

It seems like they’ve had plenty of time to “look for that video” proving her statement is true. We’ll see what happens, but it’s already obvious that she should have preemptively offered this explanation rather than waiting until people notice the unexplained gap.

A gap is one thing, but obvious editing is another. According to Wired, the metadata on the footage indicates it is not raw.

An analysis by Wired determined that the hours-long footage, released by the DOJ to quell conspiracies involving Epstein’s 2019 in-custody suicide, was “likely modified” using the professional video editing software Adobe Premiere Pro.

“The file appears to have been assembled from at least two source clips, saved multiple times, exported, and then uploaded to the DOJ’s website,” the magazine wrote.

That conclusion was reached by video forensics experts who studied the footage’s metadata. Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley whose research focuses on digital forensics and misinformation, told Wired that the footage would not be considered valid evidence in court.

“If a lawyer brought me this file and asked if it was suitable for court, I’d say no. Go back to the source. Do it right,” he said. “Do a direct export from the original system—no monkey business.”

Faird said his issues with the clip go beyond its metadata, however. He claims its aspect ratio shifts “noticeably” at multiple points.

“Why am I suddenly seeing a different aspect ratio?” he remarked to Wired.

The professor suggested that the Trump administration should pull the clip directly from prison security cameras and show it to the world. Otherwise, conspiracies will continue to run amok.

Like with the Zapruder film, making edits or “printing errors” rather than just releasing the raw information is not a recipe for removing doubt. It seems like the idea here is very basic. They have video surveillance that comes very close to proving that no one entered Epstein’s cell on the night he died, which strongly suggests he killed himself. But if that’s true, then the absolute worst thing they could do is introduce questions by editing. If a judge would throw the evidence out, there’s no chance the public will accept it at face value, and failing to understand this just makes it more suspicious. If realizing the raw footage would have made their case, why didn’t they just do that? Was it because the raw footage actually showed something else? What other innocent motive other than rank incompetence can possibly exist?

The Trump administration has badly injured themselves here, and I’m not above ascribing incompetence to these buffoons, but I can guarantee you that they just gave the conspiracy legs and cast suspicion on themselves that simply won’t go away.

And, making it worse, Trump all but confessed that the Epstein “files” incriminate him in some way. In a post at Truth Social, Trump wrote, “Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands.”

Here he his rationalizing his refusal to release the promised “Epstein files” by suggesting that they were created by his political enemies to cause him harm. That means the files have damaging information in them. True, he’s suggesting this is disinformation like the Steeele Dossier, but he’s still saying the files show something that will cause him problems.

If he thinks this will quell demands for their release, he’s delusional. He should have learned from history that lack of transparency is the engine of decades-long conspiracy theories, but he never learns anything.

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