Newly released documents have finally exposed the scramble inside the FBI to explain why a crucial minute of surveillance footage was missing from the night Jeffrey Epstein died. It turns out the agency actually destroyed the master archive of the jail video in 2024, claiming it was “no longer pertinent” once the case was closed. When public pressure forced them to release the footage a year later, they had to reconstruct it from a secondary copy using a screen-recording tool, which failed to capture 62 seconds of video right around midnight. Rather than admitting they were working from a backup of a backup, officials claimed the prison system had a “nightly reset” that caused the gap—a theory experts now say was completely unverified. While the full footage was eventually recovered and showed nothing unusual during that minute, the revelation that key evidence was destroyed and then poorly reconstructed has only fueled more questions about the transparency of the investigation.