Chris Hayes Says He’s ‘Trying to Be Rational’ About Epstein but Trump Officials Are ‘Being Weird’ | Video

Chris Hayes assured his audience on on Wednesday’s episode of MSNBC’s “All In” that “I’m trying to be rational” about Jeffrey Epstein and the various mysteries and conspiracy theories connected to his life and death. The problem for him is the Trump administration. “They’re being weird” about it all, Hayes explained.

The genesis of that thought was the CBS report about the so-called “raw footage” from Epstein’s cell prior to his 2019 death by an apparent suicide at the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in New York City. Trump officials insisted, when the video was made public 3 weeks ago, that it proved there was nothing sinister about his death. At that time, Wired magazine identified proof that the video had in fact been doctored, and now CBS News has identified “multiple inconsistencies” between the administration’s claims and the video itself, and officials “appears to have drawn conclusions from the video that are not readily observable” from watching it.

Hayes began his discussion of it saying, “every day, more questions are being raised about that Jeffrey Epstein prison cell video the Department of Justice and the FBI released with great fanfare. ‘Look how transparent we’re being.’ They described it as the full raw surveillance video from the camera near the child sex trafficker’s prison cell the night before he was found dead. It was their so-called ‘Look. Here’s the video.’”

“Right away, people noticed at least a minute was missing,” Hayes continued. “Now the explanation Attorney General Pam Bonnie gave didn’t make that much sense, something about a tech glitch. And the FBI actually has in its possession a copy of the video with the missing footage. So what exactly is going on?… I just want to start off in saying my inclination is not to think that they edited the video and that he was murdered in his prison cell. I think he probably did kill himself. I’m trying to be like rational about all this, but it’s they’re being weird.”

Hayes then played a video clip of Attorney General Pam Bondi saying, “The video was not conclusive, but the evidence prior to it was showing he committed suicide, and what was on that there was a minute that was off the counter. And what we learned from Bureau of Prisons was, every year, every night, they redo that video is old from like 1999 so every night the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing, so we’re looking for that video.”

Afterward, Hayes said to the segment’s guest, Bulwark reporter Will Sommer, “now CBS reports there’s a version of the full video. So was she lying about that? Like, what? What’s going on?”

“With so much of this Epstein situation, there are all these unanswered questions, and the government in its attempts to close the case, keeps creating more questions,” Sommer said in part. “On one hand, we were promised here, ‘the full and raw footage,’ were their words, and now they’re saying initially, as you said, she said, they’re, well, oh yeah, there’s one minute missing, which we, by the way, forgot to mention initially, and now it’s reported that there is a minute, and there’s all these other the metadata suggests that there’s, in fact, maybe three minutes that were missing, or maybe the tape was weirdly sped up. So there are all these issues that the government really is is just seems to be in no rush to answer.”

The discussion continues from there, and you can watch the whole thing below: