On the menu today: A busy news weekend was punctuated with a terrorist bombing at an IVF clinic, the sad news that former President Biden was diagnosed with “aggressive” prostate cancer, and inevitable questions about exactly when this diagnosis arrived. But two comments on one of the Sunday shows shouldn’t be overlooked amongst the news deluge. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino — two men who you figure would be highly motivated to find any sinister plot to kill Jeffrey Epstein before he would spill more secrets of powerful men, particularly if prominent Democrats were behind the plot — have concluded that Epstein killed himself. The top two FBI officials also say that in their review of the assassination attempts against Donald Trump, they’ve looked for “any possible international connections to terrorism and adversaries alike” and concluded, “the ‘there’ you’re looking for is not there.” Read on.
Battling the Epstein Death Speculation
For a while, it was one of the better jokes going around — “Well, I’d better get to work, because like Jeffrey Epstein, this painting isn’t going to hang itself.”
Epstein’s brother Mark has publicly doubted that the notorious financier killed himself. A lawyer who met with Epstein days before his death says Epstein told him he never tried to kill himself two weeks earlier, that his cellmate had given him a neck injury, and that he lied about it to avoid getting a reputation as “a rat.” Epstein reportedly told a jail psychologist he had a “wonderful life” and “would be crazy” to end it.
And of course, with a wide-ranging social circle of powerful men and a thriving practice of securing underage women for coerced sex, it was reasonable to believe that many powerful figures would have liked to see him dead before he could destroy more reputations and implicate others in his sordid deeds. (You can still buy “Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself” stickers on Amazon.) An August 2019 survey by Certus Insights found 37 percent of Americans believed Epstein committed suicide, 35 percent believed he was murdered, and 29 percent were unsure. More Republicans thought he was murdered (40 percent) than Democrats (32 percent) or independents (33 percent).
The notion that Epstein was murdered by secret sinister forces is now treated as accepted truth within our pop culture:
In real life, Barr told the Associated Press in November 2019 that he initially had his own suspicions about financier Epstein’s death “while behind bars at one of the most secure jails in America” but came to conclude that his suicide was, in his words, the result of “a perfect storm of screw-ups.”
Barr’s declaration did little to dispel the conspiracy theories.
Now, nearly six years after the notorious financier died in prison, the word from the two top officials at the FBI, appointed by President Trump, is that Epstein did indeed hang himself.
FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino sat down with Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures host Maria Bartiromo and offered a clear, and seemingly final answer:
Bartiromo: You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. People don’t believe it.
Patel: Well, I mean, listen. They have a right to their opinion, but as someone who has worked as a public defender, as a prosecutor, who’s been in that prison system, been in the Metropolitan Detention Center, who’s been in segregated housing, you know a suicide when you see one, and that’s what that was.
Bongino: He killed himself. Again, you want me to — I’ve seen the whole file. He killed himself.
During Patel’s confirmation hearing for the position of FBI director, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana asked him, “Did Jeffrey Epstein hang himself or did somebody kill him?” Patel answered, “Senator, I believe he hung himself in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center.”
Later on X, Bongino reiterated, “I was asked about some of the details surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein case. I have reviewed the case. Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. There’s no evidence in the case file indicating otherwise. I’m not asking you to believe me, or not. I’m telling you what exists, and what doesn’t. If new evidence surfaces, I’m happy to reevaluate.”
Back in 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General issued a 128-page report concluding severe staffing shortages, failures at managing inmates at risk for suicide, issues with maintaining working security cameras and a “widespread disregard of BOP policies and procedures.” The report charged that the disregard for policies and procedures were “endemic throughout the bureau nationwide.”
Inspector General Michael Horowitz appeared to address the conspiracy theories when he concluded, “While we determined MCC New York staff engaged in significant misconduct, we did not uncover evidence contradicting the FBI’s determination there was no criminality in connection with how Epstein died.”
From an NPR report:
Contrary to MCC and BOP policies and procedures, Epstein was allowed to sleep on the floor, had extra blankets and clothes. Photos of Epstein’s cell included in the report shows piles of what appears to be orange clothes strewn about the floor and bed.
Epstein was also allowed to use a jail phone the night before he died that was unmonitored, in violation of BOP policy, and was not re-assigned a new cellmate despite previously attempting suicide.
Epstein was also supposed to be under watch for that prior attempt. But two correctional officers, Michael Thomas and Tova Noel, who were assigned to guard Epstein overnight failed to complete more than 75 mandatory checks on him. He was left in his cell overnight, and only discovered dead at 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10.
As recently as February 7, Dan Bongino was hosting his podcast, talking up Epstein’s connections to the Clintons, and declaring, “It’s time to start overturning that rock, and seeing what’s underneath”:
I’ve been covering it for a long time. The Jeffrey Epstein case, you do not know all the details of this thing, I promise. There are a lot of really obviously powerful people. This part you know, but the specific names, we may not. Including, I believe, the Clintons, based on information I discussed yesterday, who are knee-deep in involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, and no one can figure out what the level of entanglement is. Jeffrey Epstein met with Obama’s fixer, his lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, who was always the one in the middle of these Obama scandals. And we can’t figure out why, what they’re hiding. Here’s Marsha Blackburn, who has been all over this, she’s a senator [in] Tennessee, a Republican obviously. And she’s like, “Hey, man. Is it time now? It’s time to start overturning that rock and seeing what’s underneath.”
(Kathryn Ruemmler was President Obama’s longest-serving Whtie House counsel and previously served as associate counsel to President Bill Clinton.)
In other words, if there were any two figures who would be intensely motivated to investigate and prove a plot by some sort of powerful figure (particularly on the Democratic side of the political spectrum) to murder Epstein in his cell and make it look like a suicide, Patel and Bongino are the guys. They apparently have examined the existing case files and concluded there is no evidence, or anything that warrants further investigation.
A handful of lesser-known MAGA social-media influencers immediately contended that Patel and Bongino were sellouts who were now complicit in a coverup.
Those same individuals are also likely to be disappointed by Patel and Bongino’s answers on the assassination attempts on Donald Trump, and that there are no indications of any foreign involvement or a larger plot. Bongino summarized, “In some of these cases, the ‘there’ you’re looking for is not there”:
Bartiromo: I know you can’t talk about any active investigation, and our viewers understand that. How come we don’t have more information on the assassination attempts on President Trump?
Patel: There are two reasons. Two open, ongoing prosecutions. So, two of the investigations are obviously closed, because the individuals are dead, but there’s two live prosecutions. And so, we can’t get ahead of the federal court case. A lot of that information will come out in the federal court cases.
But we have personally invested our time in making sure that we have looked at all the, any possible international connections to terrorism and adversaries alike, and we’ve both been down to Quantico. We’ve both done the laboratory testing, we’ve both seen the explosives analysis, we’ve both seen the firearm and physically held it, we are all in on these investigations.
Bartiromo: Are we going to be surprised at what you learned?
Bongino: You know what, Maria? Kash is not kidding, we’ve been personally briefed extensively on every single detail, nugget, tendril of this case. One is actively in court right now, so out of respect for the case, it’s probably more appropriate that I stay quiet on that. However, I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth, and whether you like it or not is up to you.
If there was a big, explosive “there” there — given my history as a Secret Service agent, and my personal friendship as a director does with the president, give me one logical, sensible reason we would not have — if you can think of one, there isn’t. In some of these cases, the “there” you’re looking for is not there. And I know people — I get it, I understand. It’s not there. If it was there, we would have told you.
No doubt, someone out there on the Internet, with a “wall of crazy” behind him, is feverishly typing, concluding that “the conspiracy” got to Patel and Bongino — or perhaps that Trump was the mastermind behind the assassination attempts on himself.
ADDENDUM: I will be away from my usual podcast appearances for a few days, as early Saturday night, a giant tree crashed into the Geraghty home in Authenticity Woods. Thankfully, everyone inside is alive and well, and on the other side of the house when it happened. However, one corner of our home now looks like a FEMA camp; I am attributing this to an attack by “Oak-Qaeda.”
I’ve never been much of a tree-hugger, and just my luck, the one next door took it personally.
I will note that nothing this dangerous happened to me in Ukraine or Syria.
