Staff Reports
This week the Department of Justice rolled out a massive tranche of Epstein-related files and — to the horror of anyone expecting competence — included a grainy 12-second clip that allegedly showed Jeffrey Epstein taking his own life. Fact-checkers quickly identified the clip as computer-generated and the DOJ quietly removed it from the release, an extraordinary embarrassment for an agency that claims to safeguard public trust. The presence of a fake video in official files is not a small mistake; it is a glaring failure of basic vetting.
The missteps didn’t end there. The DOJ has since pulled roughly 9,500 documents for further review after victims and advocates flagged careless redactions and exposed identities, forcing officials to admit technical and human errors during the staggered rollout. That kind of bungling from an institution with vast resources looks less like incompetence in the abstract and more like an administration that can’t be bothered to get the facts right.
Americans who have followed this case for years know why suspicion runs high: guards who falsified logs, gaps in video surveillance, and a death that left more questions than answers. Those documented failures — including falsified guard records and uneven investigative transparency — are on the public record and make skepticism of government narratives not paranoid but reasonable. The country deserves precise, unambiguous answers, not more spin to paper over malpractice.
Whether this is clumsy incompetence, a cover-up, or some combination of both, the practical effect is identical: confidence in our institutions erodes. Releasing a demonstrably fake clip and then pretending nothing happened only fans the flames of suspicion that powerful figures were shielded while victims were once again treated as an afterthought.
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act to force daylight on decades of unanswered questions, and yet the law’s intent is being undermined by sloppy execution and political theater. If transparency means anything, it means full accountability — not staggered rollouts, not mass redactions that reveal victims, and certainly not the spectacle of the DOJ putting junk into the public record. The American people and their representatives must insist on real oversight.
Hardworking Americans deserve the truth and nothing less; we owe it to the victims and to the principle that no one is above the law. Until the government proves it can handle the truth without dropping the ball or covering for the connected, demanding answers isn’t conspiracy — it’s citizenship.
