MSNBC's Joe Scarborough laughed out loud at Attorney General Pam Bondi's explanation of a missing minute in an 11-hour surveillance video recorded outside disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein's prison cell.
The Justice Department released the video to help dispel claims that the convicted sex trafficker had not committed suicide, but skeptics questioned why time stamps of the video skipped from 11:58 p.m. to midnight, which Bondi explained was standard operating procedure for Bureau of Prisons surveillance systems as they reset each night.
"I'm not a surveillance expert, but they set up a system that has a minute missing every night?" the "Morning Joe" host said, laughing. "I'll tell you what we're going to do – I got this great new system we're going to set up in the prison, because we want to make sure that nothing really, really bad happens. Yeah, and so this system is great and it's going to go all 24 hours, but like, like late at night when, when bad s--- can really go down, what we're going to do is we're going to have a minute missing so it can reset. Is that – would you go, I'm curious, would you go to this surveillance company to set up your home security cameras?"
"My understanding is, for 23 hours and 59 minutes, it's the safest prison you could want," deadpanned co-host Jonathan Lemire.
"They're the best," Scarborough continued. "They're the best."
"They are the best," Lemire agreed. "You know, that last minute, you take your chances, I guess. Yeah, I mean, this sort of explanation defies reason, and certainly it is remarkable on just the shift in tone here. President Trump himself has not spoken that much about Epstein, but plenty of people, you know, throughout, but plenty of people in this world have for a very long time, and that's why we're seeing a bit of a real almost not not civil war, but a real infighting in Trump world, in MAGA land right now, because they've been promised for so long to get the goods."
Producers displayed the surveillance video from the night Epstein died and Scarborough noted the missing minute, after which the financier was never seen alive.
"You know, and the thing is, since everybody knows, since everybody knows that you have that minute, yeah, that skips, I mean, thank God, thank God they know that because they'll make sure not to do anything bad during that minute when the film doesn't work, because the attorney general said they set up a system that just doesn't record every minute," Scarborough said.
"I had heard yesterday somebody say that [former attorney general] Bill Barr had said, 'I looked through all of the minutes, I said, I did it intentionally to know that nothing went awry,'" Scarborough added, and then hooted with laughter at Bondi's explanation of the missing minute. "Well, yeah – no, you didn't see everything because you didn't see the minute that we now find out is not a bug, but a feature. Who's ever heard of a prison surveillance camera that was set up to not record the same minute every day?"
"They really should have read the fine print," Lemire added. Yeah, read the fine print – it's just right there. Look for that one minute, sorry, that's just how it works."
- YouTube youtu.be
