The two guards who were supposed to keep an eye on Wall Street financier Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious pervert and convicted sex offender who supposedly hanged himself in his jail cell, surfed the Internet and slept at their post, a federal indictment says.
A federal grand jury indicted the pair on fraud charges because they failed to check on Epstein every 30 minutes. While under a multi-count sex-trafficking indictment, Epstein was incarcerated at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.
The two guards were supposed to appear in U.S. District Court in Manhattan today, the New York Times reported.
Until today, federal authorities hadn’t charged anyone in Epstein’s death, which the coroner for New York City ruled a suicide, but which Epstein’s family and celebrity forensic pathologist Michael Baden suggest might have been a murder.
The circumstances of Epstein’s death, as well what he could have testified about rich, powerful ruling-class elites, suggest he was the target of a Deep-State hit.
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The Indictment
The guards who didn’t check on Epstein every half hour as required are Tova Noel and Michael Thomas.
“In dereliction of their duties,” the six-count indictment says, they “repeatedly failed to perform mandated counts of prisoners under their watch” in the federal lockup’s Special Housing Unit.
Instead, for substantial portions of their shifts, NOEL and THOMAS sat at their desk, browsed the internet, and moved around the common area of the SHU. To conceal their failure to perform their duties, NOEL and THOMAS repeatedly signed false certifications attesting to having conducted multiple counts of inmates when, in truth and in fact, they never conducted such counts. As a result of those false statements, the MCC believed prisoners in the SHU were being regularly monitored and accounted for when, in fact, as a result of the defendants conduct, no correctional officer conducted any count or round of the SHU from approximately 10:30 p.m. on August 9 until approximately 6:30 a.m. on August 10.
That’s when they found Epstein hanged — supposedly by his own hand, with a bedsheet around his neck and attached his bunk.
But dereliction is not their only crime, prosecutors allege. They also falsified records to show they did check on Epstein.
The indictment explains that Epstein was on suicide watch for 24 hours after his suicide attempt on July 23, then moved to “psychological observation.” He stayed there until July 30, when jail authorities sent him back to the SHU.
Epstein occupied the “cell closest to the correctional officers desk in the common area of the SHU, which was approximately fifteen feet from the cell,” the indictment says, but 30-minute checks were still required.
The two guards “were responsible for conducting five institutional counts: 4 p.m. and 10 p.m. on August 9; and 12 a.m., 3 a.m., and 5 a.m. on August 10,” and as well “for completing paperwork attesting to each of those counts.”
But video surveillance, the indictment alleges, shows that Tova and Thomas did not perform rounds, that they falsified records to say they did, and they slept and played on the Internet.
Instead of completing the required counts and rounds … [they] were seated at the correctional officers desk in the SHU common area … used the computers, and moved around the SHU common area. For a period of approximately two hours, NOEL and THOMAS sat at their desk without moving, and appeared to have been asleep. NOEL used the computer periodically throughout the night, including to search the internet for furniture sales and benefit websites. THOMAS used the computer briefly around 1 a.m, 4 a.m., and 6 a.m. to search for motorcycle sales and sports news.
The indictment alleges the pair “knowingly conspired … to knowingly defraud” the government and “knowingly make and use a false writing” to carry out the fraud.
Common Problem
In its report of November 16 that the guards turned down a plea deal, the Associated Press claimed that the federal lockup is “chronically understaffed,” and that “guards often work overtime day after day, and other employees are pressed into service as correctional officers.”
AP also reported that “falsification of records has been a problem throughout the federal prison system.”
Maybe, but those facts don’t explain why Epstein’s hyoid bone was broken, which suggests strangling not suicidal hanging, as Baden and others have observed.
That aside, Epstein was tight as a tick with the rich and powerful, including former President Bill Clinton, who flew on Epstein’s sex plane 26 times, and Prince Andrew, who also flew on the jet and posed for a photo with Epstein’s former sex slave, Virginia Giuffre.
Andrew denies having sex with Giuffre.
Giuffre said Epstein collected compromising information about the global powerbrokers who sojourned on his sex island.
Thus, the question to ask about Epstein’s demise is this: Cui bono?
Image: D-Keine via iStock / Getty Images Plus
