FBI, DOJ Have Video With Missing Minute From Epstein Jail Video, Report Claims

The FBI, DOJ inspector general and the Bureau of Prisons have footage including the "missing minute" from the area outside Jeffrey Epstein's cell before he died, according to a new report.

Citing a person familiar with the matter, CBS News detailed that the entities have a copy of the video that doesn't cut from just before 11:59 p.m. to midnight on the night of Epstein's death.

The footage was at the center of a controversy earlier this month after Wired reported that the images released had been altered. The missing video contributed to skepticism about the events surrounding Epstein's death, especially considering that officials said it helped confirm there were no suspicious moves on that night.

Wired noted that metadata embedded in the 11-hour "raw" surveillance footage shows it was not a direct export from the prison's surveillance system, instead indicating the video was processed using Adobe Premiere Pro, a professional video editing tool.

The footage appears to have been stitched together from at least two separate source clips, saved four times, and exported before it was uploaded to the DOJ website. The metadata reveals two source clips, Premiere project files, and attributes the edits to a Windows user account named "MJCOLE~1" on May 23, 2025, in a roughly 23-minute span.

Digital forensics expert Hany Farid, who reviewed the data for WIRED, said the file raises serious questions about chain of custody. "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," Farid said.

Attorney General Pam Bondi was questioned about the gap in early May, saying that it was the result of a nightly reset and it happened every night. "There was a minute that was off that counter and what we learned from [the] Bureau of Prisons was every year, every night, they redo that video," she said.

Bondi added that this was a result of the equipment being old and she would release other footage showing the system always behaved the same way. However, she has not done it so far. Experts interviewed by CBS News that a nightly reset would be unusual and not something seen in most video systems.