It appears that the Attorney General has had enough of all the Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself memes and is looking to put the whole unpleasant affair behind us. In an interview with the Associated Press, William Bar admitted that he’d harbored some of his own suspicions at first, but after a thorough investigation came to conclude that the serial pedophile’s death was the result of an unlikely chain of mistakes and not a murder.

Attorney General William Barr said he initially had his own suspicions about financier Jeffrey Epstein’s death while behind bars at one of the most secure jails in America but came to conclude that his suicide was the result of “a perfect storm of screw-ups.”

In an interview with The Associated Press, Barr said his concerns were prompted by the numerous irregularities at the Manhattan jail where Epstein was being held. But he said after the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general continued to investigate, he realized there were a “series” of mistakes made that gave Epstein the chance to take his own life.

“I can understand people who immediately, whose minds went to sort of the worst-case scenario because it was a perfect storm of screw-ups,” Barr told the AP as he flew to Montana for an event.

My first thought upon reading this was to question how he can be so sure. After all, isn’t everyone just going on the word of the people at the prison? As it turns out, at least according to Barr, there was some conclusive evidence.

Barr said that he “personally reviewed security footage that confirmed that no one entered the area where Epstein was housed on the night he died.” This is a curious thing to reveal since the cameras that should have been trained on the cell weren’t working when the prisoner died. But I assume this means that there were functional cameras covering the hall leading to and from the cell, so they would have recorded anyone heading toward the entry or departing.

Still, some of the other details sound strange. We’ve been told repeatedly that the guards were supposed to be checking on Epstein every thirty minutes. But Barr indicates that the records show that the guards failed to conduct the required checks at three and five o’clock in the morning. The guards reported finding Epstein unresponsive at 6:30 am.

Previous accounts suggested that Epstein had been left alone with nobody checking on him for a couple of hours. But this means that if Barr’s account is accurate, the guards would have completed their rounds at 5:30 and 6:00 am and found nothing amiss. And if Barr is correct about the cameras covering the hall, he should have been able to confirm that the guards did, in fact, complete those last two checks. Then, when checking on him at 6:30, they found that he had already hung himself and was near death.

If that’s the case, then Epstein had to have completed the job of fashioning a noose and hanging himself in less than 30 minutes. I suppose that’s possible if someone is really determined to take their own life. But it also means that none of the “screw-ups” by the guards skipping their rounds really made any difference. If the prisoner was able to pull off what I described, he could have done it during any thirty-minute interval between the guards’ rounds even if they’d never missed a single check. The only thing that might have prevented it in that case would have been if the camera monitoring the cell itself was working and someone was paying attention to it. (Or if he had been assigned a cellmate as he should have.)

Still, as unlikely as this all seems, I’m hesitant to cast any doubt on Barr’s story. At this point, if Epstein was actually “silenced” in a terminal fashion, the coverup would have to extend past the guards and the warden all the way up to the Justice Department and the Attorney General himself. And that would simply be audacious beyond belief. Er… wouldn’t it?