Try as he might, President Donald Trump is failing miserably to get the world to move on from the still-unfolding Jeffrey Epstein crisis.
Trump's loyal fan base devolved into a cesspool of conspiracy theories after the White House walked back claims about the late billionaire sex criminal, concluding that Epstein had no "client list" and that the sex criminal had killed himself in jail, rather than being killed to keep him silent.
In a wildly backfired attempt to sweep the affair under the rug, Trump took to Truth Social last week, baselessly claiming that Epstein is "somebody that nobody cares about."
Besides a cacophony of outrage, the US Department of Justice and FBI are also struggling to put out the fire. Last week, the Trump administration released what it called "full raw" surveillance video footage, recorded from near Epstein's prison cell the night before he was found dead.
But as Wired reported at the time, the allegedly unaltered video showed signs of tampering. Metadata analyzed by the publication found that it was edited using the professional editing tool Adobe Premiere Pro.
And the plot continues to thicken. In followup reporting today, Wired revealed that the video appears to have had nearly three minutes cut out — further stoking the flames of a major political crisis.
As Wired suggests, the baffling discrepancy in the footage may be related to a "one-minute gap" that attorney general Pam Bondi blamed on a nightly system reset.
It remains to be seen where the story leads. However, almost three full minutes remain unaccounted for in the over four hours of footage released by the FBI.
And the optics are appalling. Trump himself had a well-documented relationship with Epstein that dates back to the late 1980s, calling him a "terrific guy" in a 2002 New York Magazine interview.
"He’s a lot of fun to be with," Trump added at the time. "It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."
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