It’s fun to conspire about the mysterious death of Jeffrey Epstein — or, at least, Cockburn has whiled away several hours doing so. Was it ordered by the Queen? Bill Gates? The Clintons? Did Ghislaine Maxwell stick a pin straight through the heart of an Epstein-shaped voodoo doll? It’s almost a shame that we now know the fault lies with something as mundane as negligent prison guards. 

The Justice Department’s watchdog announced Tuesday that a “combination of negligence, misconduct and outright job performance failures” by the Federal Bureau of Prisons and workers at its New York City jail allowed for the disgraced financier to take his own life in August 2019, finding no evidence of foul play.

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Epstein was left alone in his jail cell with extra bed linens the night he killed himself — and nearly all of the surveillance cameras pointed toward his cell didn’t record. One worker was on duty for twenty-four hours straight which meant that, despite a suicide attempt two weeks earlier, Epstein wasn’t checked on regularly as he should have been. 

After finding out about the faulty cameras, an electronics technician arrived at the prison at around 6:00 am on the day that Epstein died. Before he could fix anything, Epstein was found hanged. 

Inspector General Michael Horowitz of the United States Department of Justice blamed multiple factors for Jeffrey Epstein’s death; these included the jail’s failure to assign him a cellmate and prison guards who were overworked and failed to do regular rounds. Had the guards done so, Horowitz claimed that they would have found Epstein had excess linens, which he used in his suicide.

The failures “led to questions about the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death and effectively deprived Epstein’s numerous victims of the opportunity to seek justice,” Horowitz said in a statement. So much for the conspiracy theorizing…