The Morning Joe team couldn’t hold back their laughter after hearing Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi’s explanation for a strange gap in the surveillance video from Jeffrey Epstein’s prison cell.
The Justice Department released 11 hours of footage from the night Epstein died, hoping to silence conspiracy theories. But viewers quickly noticed the video skips exactly one minute—from 11:58 p.m. to midnight. That missing minute is right before Epstein was found dead.
Bondi claimed the missing time was normal. According to her, surveillance systems at federal prisons reset each night, which causes a one-minute gap.
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough wasn’t buying it.
“I’m not a surveillance expert, but they set up a system that has a minute missing every night?” he 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.”
Then he added sarcastically: “Would you go to this surveillance company to set up your home security cameras?”
Co-host Jonathan Lemire joined in: “My understanding is, for 23 hours and 59 minutes, it’s the safest prison you could want.”
“They’re the best,” Scarborough responded, laughing.
“They are the best,” Lemire echoed. “You know, that last minute, you take your chances, I guess.”
The panel kept hammering the logic of Bondi’s defense, calling it absurd. Lemire said the explanation “defies reason” and pointed out how this fuels even more infighting in Trump’s world, especially among people who have long pushed for “the goods” on Epstein.
Scarborough then mocked the idea again as the video of the missing minute aired on screen.
“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,” he said.
Scarborough also ridiculed former Attorney General Bill Barr, recalling how Barr claimed he’d reviewed the footage thoroughly.
“I had heard yesterday somebody say that Bill Barr had said, ‘I looked through all of the minutes, I said, I did it intentionally to know that nothing went awry,’” Scarborough said, then burst out laughing. “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?”
Lemire quipped, “They really should have read the fine print. Yeah, read the fine print – it’s just right there. Look for that one minute, sorry, that’s just how it works.”
Watch the segment below from MSNBC.
