The US Department of Justice on 7 July released roughly 11 hours of surveillance video from the corridor outside Jeffrey Epstein’s cell at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, saying the material showed no one entered the area before Epstein was found dead in 2019. The government presented the file as “full raw” footage. Within hours of publication, independent viewers noticed the recording jumps from 11:58:58 p.m. to 12:00:00 a.m., creating a one-minute blackout that Attorney General Pam Bondi attributed to a routine nightly system reset. The lapse rekindled public skepticism over the official ruling that Epstein died by suicide. A forensic review published by WIRED on 15 July deepened those doubts. Metadata embedded in the DOJ file indicates it was stitched together in Adobe Premiere Pro from two separate clips and that 2 minutes 53 seconds were removed from the first segment—ending precisely at the start of the widely discussed one-minute gap—before the second clip begins at midnight. The editing took place over a 3½-hour span on 23 May 2025, contradicting the government’s claim that the release was unedited. The DOJ referred questions about the discrepancy to the FBI, which declined to comment. President Donald Trump has defended Bondi’s handling of the matter, but the new findings have prompted fresh calls from lawmakers and civil-rights groups for the agencies to release the complete, unaltered footage and to explain why any material was excised.