The investigation into convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide is leaking like a sieve and none of the information showing up in the press is likely doing much to bolster anyone’s confidence. (For the record, I’m not quite ready to put the word suicide in scare quotes yet, but man… it’s getting close.) The latest news from the Washington Post will only serve to further muddy the waters. It’s being reported that a camera monitoring the hallway outside Epstein’s cell had mysteriously malfunctioned and at least some of the video taken around the time of his death is “unusable.” Before I go completely off the rails here, let’s see what the report actually says.

At least one camera in the hallway outside the cell where authorities say registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself earlier this month had footage that is unusable, although other, clearer footage was captured in the area, according to three people briefed on the evidence gathered earlier this month.

It was not immediately clear why some video footage outside Epstein’s cell is too flawed for investigators to use or what is visible in the usable footage. The incident is being investigated by the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office, which are attempting to determine what happened and how to assess whether any policies were violated or crimes committed.

Look, I don’t want to be that guy. You know. The one who hops aboard every conspiracy theory that comes barreling down the tracks of the internet. But how much more of this garbage are we supposed to sit through? Let’s review the chain of events one more time, shall we?

– First, a jail that was so overcrowded that everyone was working twelve-hour shifts somehow wound up with Epstein in a cell by himself.
– A doctorate-level psychologist took Epstein off suicide watch after only six days, despite having found that he’d tried to kill himself.
– The cell he was alone in was one without a camera monitoring the interior, even though the prisoner had recently been on suicide watch.
– The overworked guards were so tired that they fell asleep during the critical hours when the death occurred.
– The autopsy revealed Epstein had broken his hyoid bone, which one study claims only happens in 6% of hanging suicides. (Other experts dispute that.)
– And now, a camera monitoring the hallway that might have revealed if anyone had gone in or out of the cell during that time has malfunctioned.

I will force myself to remind everyone that coincidences actually do happen in this world. In fact, they happen every day. But they also spur us to look more closely at a situation to make sure that it really was a coincidence. And in the case of Epstein’s death, the coincidences are piling up like jets waiting to take off from JFK.

On top of that, the personnel at that jail haven’t exactly been covering themselves in glory. The internal investigation found something (or things) that led them to transfer the warden and suspend some of the guards. We already know that they falsified logs indicating that they had been personally checking on the prisoners. And now a camera that could have potentially recorded vital evidence has mysteriously failed?

There comes a point where we have to at least ask the obvious question. How sure are these officials that it had to be a suicide? The officials at the jail seem to have done their level best to raise suspicions about their behavior. And every avenue of definitively showing that nobody else was in the cell that morning has mostly collapsed.

Yes, I will still give a nod to the other side of this coin. As I’ve said repeatedly, Epstein had every reason in the world to take his own life if he was so inclined. And assuming the reports of the initial “incident” are accurate, he’d already tried to do it once. So we obviously can’t rule it out. But at the same time, there were other people who obviously might have found it “convenient” (at a minimum) if the guy were to suddenly take leave of the land of the living. Perhaps it still really did happen the way the official story is being told. But boy, howdy, it’s getting to the point where it almost seems like they’re begging us to go with a conspiracy theory.