Longtime media analyst Angelo Carusone from Media Matters explained that Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino are making President Donald Trump's Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy worse.
Speaking to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday, Carusone noted that a key part of the Epstein conspiracy theorist community centers around the missing clip of the Bureau of Prisons video from the facility where he was being held. The video is not of Epstein's cell, however. But the way Bondi explained it just made things worse, Carusone said.
"What Pam Bondi has said is that that's a normal thing," he said of the missing clip. "It happens all the time. And, so, let's never talk about this again. Although that's continuing to percolate. What the story, though, is in the media, and this is the part to consider, is that that is literally what you just described, is conspiracy fodder. Eleven hours of recording, and there's one minute missing that somehow just disappears."
Carusone said that not only does no one believe it, even Trump's strongest supporters don't buy into the claim.
Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown, who doggedly pursued the sex trafficking story surrounding Epstein, said that it infuriates her that people focus on the so-called "missing minute" of video when the footage was nowhere near the cell to begin with.
"I don't know whether anybody has read the report of Epstein that the Bureau of Prisons did on his death, but they go into great detail about the cameras in his unit," she said. "There was only one camera that was recording that night, and that camera was not in the wing where Epstein's cell was."
She said the conspiracy theorists are missing the point entirely, and what is at issue is that there was zero footage at all of Epstein's area because the cameras didn't "work."
Carusone then brought up Bongino, who has been largely quiet after reports of his outburst at Bondi. In an extensive post on X, he made a comment about being "really deep in the deep state lately" and that he had encountered something that "shook him to his core."
It only adds to those demanding answers on the matter. Rightly or wrongly, the implication is that things are far worse than he expected.
"They seem to think that maybe if they take this conspiracy fodder and just throw more conspiracy on top of it, that that is the way to deal with it," said Carusone.
"Even if everything they say is accurate about it, and it happens all the time, it's conspiracy fodder," said Carusone. "And the way they've approached it to a conspiratorially minded audience that has already kind of worked up is to give them more, more conspiracies."
It only adds to Bondi's reputation among the MAGA world as she was serving as Florida's attorney general before the DOJ nabbed Epstein. She could have done her own state prosecution of him, but chose not to.
See the clip below or at the link here.