A newly released report indicates that officers at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan, N.Y., were dumping an “unusual” amount of shredded material just days after Epstein’s death.
The report comes from The Miami Herald, which analyzed thousands of documents by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) related to deceased financier and convicted child sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.
“The discovery was only one of many suspicious events that unfolded in the days and weeks both before – and after – Epstein’s death,” Julie K. Brown and Claire Healy of The Miami Herald reported.
According to the documents, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was informed that officers from the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ After Action Team were shredding bags of documents following the launch of a probe into Epstein’s death.
Multiple accounts from an inmate and correctional officers at MCC recount the events that took place on Aug. 15 and 16 following Epstein’s death on Aug. 10, 2019.
“They are shredding everything,” an inmate told one of the guards.
According to the inmate, he was ordered to help unfamiliar officers shred the documents and then throw bags of shredded material into a dumpster located at MCC’s rear gate.
A corrections officer at MCC also called the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center on Aug. 16 at 6:28 p.m. to report that he had “never seen this amount of bags of shredded documents coming out to be put in the dumpster at the rear gate of MCC.”
“I believe that this conduct may be inappropriate for [an] investigative team to be shredding paperwork related to the investigation and you may want to investigate why BOP employees are destroying records,” wrote another correctional officer stationed at the rear gate in a written memo to investigators on Aug. 19, 2019.
In its report, The Miami Herald also uncovered reports of the first call to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center, interviews with the inmate and correctional officers, the “suspicious” ruling of Epstein’s death as a suicide, an anonymous letter sent to a federal judge implying the “government” is covering up the destruction of the records, and “suspicious” cash deposits of three correctional officers who were on duty the night of Epstein’s death.
