How WIRED Analyzed the Epstein Video

0:01Hey everyone, this is Mike. Before we start, I want to take the chance to remind you that we want to hear from you. Do you have a question around AI, politics, or privacy that has been on your mind, or just a topic that you wish we talked about on the show? If so, you can write to us at uncannyvalleyatwired.com. And if you listen to and enjoy our episodes, please rate the show and leave a review on your podcast app of choice. It really helps other people find us. How is everybody doing this week? I'm doing well. I am recovering from a vacation. I went to Detroit, Michigan with my family. If you haven't spent time in Detroit, I highly recommend it as a vacation destination, which may surprise you depending on what kinds of vacations you like to take.

0:50But if you like to spend time in interesting cities with great food, you could spend some time in Detroit. It was awesome. So I'm good. I just, you know, you come back from vacation and you're like, you hate everything. And so I'm there. But I'll get out of it. I'll be fine. Isn't the purpose of a vacation, though, to give you a little bit of relaxation and perspective so that you don't hate everything? That's not the kind of vacation I take, Lauren. Okay. We need to get you to a spa. So Detroit's famous for its pizza, for its square pizza. How does it rate? And its cars. Yeah, and its cars. but really we're more concerned about pizza.

1:29You know, we had pizza twice. We had Detroit style pizza night one. I mean, it's delicious. I find it very heavy. I like to like power consume pizza. So like I like three, four, five pieces of pizza. You can't do that with this pizza. You know what I mean? Yes. So I find that to be kind of a bummer. But like it's good. It's just very heavy. Katie, I have a very important question for you. Okay. Do you eat your pizza with a fork? No. Thank God. Do you? Oh, yeah, I'm shaking it out. We can keep going. Definitely not. Okay. No. No chance. No. No, no chance. As Jon Stewart once said, you fold it and you eat it.

2:10Yes. I generally fold mine into a small sphere and I just take the whole thing and put it right in my mouth. I like that. Who is that voice who just joined us on this podcast? It's me. It's Drew. It's our resident conspiracy theorist. This is Wired's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, the Jeffrey Epstein prison tapes. Likely you have heard that the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has released nearly 11 hours of footage from a camera outside Epstein's prison cell. The tape was from the night before he was found dead in his cell in 2019.

2:52When it was made public, we here at Wired immediately analyzed the footage and found that it had been modified, and that nearly three minutes seemed to have been cut from the feed. Wired's Dhruv Mirotra and independent video forensic experts went through the footage's metadata and found that it was likely modified using Adobe video editing software. This news has led to a deluge of speculation across the internet about what the edits to the footage mean, if anything. We'll dive into what this means and why the Epstein case has proven to be a surprising fracturing point for Trump's right-wing base.

3:32I'm Michael Kalori, Director of Consumer Tech and Culture here at Wired. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. We're also incredibly lucky to have with us today our Wired colleague who analyzed this recent release footage himself on the show. please welcome Dhruv Marotra. Hi, thanks for having me.

3:58Okay, well, let's start with why this video was released at all. It's been almost six years since Jeffrey Epstein's death, hasn't it? It has been. Jeffrey Epstein died in August of 2019, and pretty much from the start, his death has fueled all of these conspiracy theories, partly because of his very high-profile associations. He was known to be friends with and business associates with and fraternize with celebrities and high-ranking officials and, you know, even technologists. Also because of the explosive nature of the sex trafficking charges that Epstein was facing. So this all kind of had the elements that the internet needs to fuel a giant conspiracy theory.

4:43Now, one of the elements that fueled these theories was the fact that around the time when Epstein died by suicide, there was a malfunction in the cameras where he was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. About half their cameras weren't working. None of them had a clear view of Epstein's cell door. This has been previously reported by Wired. And people have speculated that this is when he could have been killed, even though there's no proof whatsoever of that. And, you know, we'll talk more about this later, but this issue is still alive and thriving online because Trump and his allies really capitalized on these conspiracy theories, all the theories about Epstein and what happened to him in that prison on the campaign trail.

5:24So Trump promised, you know, running his campaign for his second term, that his administration would release allegedly explosive revelations about what really happened when Epstein died in custody in 2019 and Epstein's supposed quote-unquote client list. So for months leading up to the joint memo that the DOJ and FBI published last week, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, had promised to release records related to Epstein. So some of those have been slowly released. And this latest video that Dhruv has been reporting on is the latest piece of that rollout. So that's really how we got here. Yeah.

6:02Now, Dhruv, how did you go about analyzing the footage? And how did you arrive at the conclusion that the video wasn't actually raw footage as it was described? Yeah, so on Monday last week, DOJ and FBI released two videos, and there's sort of almost immediate speculation about whether or not these videos were doctored. So, you know, I wanted to look at the files themselves and not the sort of video feed, but examine the metadata of the video just to figure out if there was anything in there that I could see that could lead to any clues about it being doctored. This is something I often do because as a journalist, you're often vetting leaked or hacked documents to see if they were tampered with or something like that.

6:46So, you know, the first step was downloading both versions of the video that the FBI released, the so-called raw version, and then the enhanced one. They said that they had, alongside the raw video, they say they released a video that had some enhancements that helped their analysts come to the conclusion that Epstein, in fact, killed himself. So together, each video was about 21 gigabytes. I ran both of those files through this metadata analysis tool. And I looked at what is called XMP metadata, which is basically data that's embedded by software on a file and when it's touched, essentially. So looking at that data, it became pretty clear pretty quickly, actually, that it wasn't a direct export from a surveillance system as the FBI kind of described it in their memo.

7:37Instead, the metadata showed that the video had been assembled from two distinct clips, two different MP4 files using Adobe Premiere. It even names the files in the metadata. So, you know, those files are listed in a metadata section called Ingredients, which is how Premiere tracks the source materials that are used in a project. And in that metadata, we also saw that the project was saved multiple times and that there were internal markers and comments left behind likely used to flag activity during the review. So all of this is sort of standard for edited video workflows, but it really contradicts the DOJ's description of this as raw video.

8:18You know, it's not raw. It was manually edited and stitched together as a composite of two different video recordings. It's really wild to me in the context of like unforced error. And how did no one in the DOJ or the FBI think, oh, maybe someone is going to look at the metadata? Like that's one very obvious question. But then, Druv, on a more sort of technical note, if someone has that foresight, if they think, okay, there will be metadata attached to these files, da-da-da-da-da, someone could look at it, what are their options? Like, is there anything that you can do to scrub the metadata on video files like these that potentially they could have done if they didn't want some annoying reporter like you to go looking or poking around to see sort of what was in there?

9:06She says that with maximum affection, Druv. Of course. you're not annoying to me but you're definitely annoying to them right now yeah i definitely get the sense that i'm very annoying to them right now yeah um yes there are plenty of things that you can do to scrub metadata from a file before you upload it somewhere for someone to download and inspect um in fact that's sort of standard practice across the internet i think yeah most social media platforms when you upload a photo from your iphone or from your android it'll scrub the metadata before it puts it up on Instagram or whatever. And, you know, it's also standard practice for reporters to do that if we, you know, receive documents and we don't want to, you know, we want to publish parts of the documents, but not the entirety of them.

9:50We'll scrub metadata and make sure that nothing in the file can lead back to our sourcing. So, you know, it's standard practice and frankly, kind of surprising that the FBI didn't do it. With that said, though, it also, you know, forensically, you could see a world where you would want to keep the metadata in to show the public or show a judge or show attorneys exactly who touched a file before it was released publicly. So that way there was like a sort of trail of custody to make sure that the evidence hadn't been tampered with. So I can see it working both ways, but it seems like that's just neither of those cases is what happened here.

10:26Do we know who touched this file? We do, sort of. We know that this file was edited by a Windows user with the name MJ Cole. I think that's a partial username, not a full username, but someone named MJ Cole and perhaps the longer last name, I suppose. Right. And we know we have this name because this is the person who logged into the machine. This is the name attached to the Adobe license. Like, how do we know this is actually the person? because it could have just been another video editor logged into someone else's machine. No, that's a good point. We know, I should say that we know that the user account that opened the file and edited it was MJ Cole.

11:07Whether or not someone else was using that Windows computer at the time, you know, that's impossible for me to say with the metadata alone. Drew, I'm glad you mentioned that about the workflow of video journalists because a very long time ago, I was a video journalist. And I can attest to having exported the same video file multiple times from Apple Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere with, you know, absolutely zero intention of manipulating the video content, just maybe trimming or making one small change in exporting the files. In this instance, what's notable about these file exports that could lead people to potentially believe that they were manipulated with malintent?

11:48Yeah, I mean, I think at first I was just trying to confirm that any kind of editing software had been used, right? I think if you are just trying to export some proprietary surveillance CCTV footage to an MP4, there are lighter weight tools than Adobe Premiere, which has all of these actually, you know, additional AI based editing features to them, right? And I think speaking to forensic experts, that was one of the big questions they had. It's like, look, if you're just going to export a video, why use Premiere? So that was one big question I had. But after getting a few tips, I also noticed more odd things in the metadata outside of them just using Adobe Premiere.

12:31Specifically, there were timestamps in the source video clips that were composited to form the final video. The first source file is listed as being four hours and 19 minutes long, but the video that was actually used in the final output was only four hours and 16 minutes long, which means that nearly three minutes were cut from this original clip that was put into the video, which is a sign of an edit, not just an export. When I spoke to Hani Fareed, he's a UC Berkeley professor who focuses on digital forensics and frankly testifies in court often about manipulated media. He pointed out very quickly just watching the video that the aspect ratio of the footage changed throughout the video.

13:18So, you know, I think it was pretty widely reported when the video first came out that there was a missing minute. Attorney General Pai Mbandi kind of attributed that missing minute to just routine turnover and surveillance footage and sort of just wrote it off as nothing to really be concerned about. But what's interesting about that is like after that jump, the aspect ratio changes. You can see like a little toolbar in the top right of the screen. So, you know, this isn't a raw export of surveillance footage. Something else is kind of happening here, and we just don't know enough about the sort of the process the DOJ and the FBI used to analyze these videos to really say much.

13:57And, you know, obviously, right, we have plenty of sort of careful language in these stories that you've published, Drew, but none of this proves that the videos were edited with the intention of deceiving people, of hiding something, right? There are some pretty boring explanations for all of this, although I will say they're not exactly doing themselves any favors at all, which is like so painful to witness because these do feel like a lot of real amateur hour unforced errors if in fact this is all very, you know, banal stuff. Yeah, I mean, look, like the goal of the story wasn't to prove or disprove a conspiracy.

14:39It was really to independently verify what the DOJ and FBI said about the footage, which is that it was a raw surveillance video. And, you know, based on the metadata, that's just not accurate. You know, it was processed, reviewed and assembled for multiple clips. And that doesn't mean that anything nefarious happened, right? There are plenty of non-sinister reasons that footage might have been reviewed or exported that way, especially if it's being prepared for public release. But when the DOJ labels something as raw and then doesn't disclose that it's been edited or stitched together, that opens the door to a lot of suspicion.

15:12And, you know, in a case like this, a high-profile case where there already is a ton of suspicion and conspiracy around Epstein, his life, his death, I think any ambiguity will just lead to more conspiracies. Right. And a lot of people online have taken this as confirmation of a cover-up. Did you anticipate that when you were putting the story out? Yeah. And I think, you know, to Katie's point about all the careful language in the story, right, like we fully expected people to run with this story and sort of to use it to fit whatever flavor of Epstein conspiracy they subscribe to, which is part of the reason that we wanted to lay out the facts very, very clearly.

15:52Because if you don't explain what the metadata actually means, someone might not do it responsibly. Right. So we wanted to be very careful with how we presented the findings. Yeah, and I think, you know, I will pat everybody involved in this reporting on the back. I'm very proud to have published it. I wouldn't think twice or blink at the idea of publishing the work. It was very carefully done and very sort of clearly explained and articulated in both stories. I think there is this sort of interesting feeling as an editor and I think as a reporter when you publish a story like this and you know, you have a fairly good sense of how the internet will respond to it, which is, you know, this is going to kick up a lot of dust.

16:33There is going to be a lot of really problematic conspiratorial conversation about this work, but the work is the work. It's true. It's accurate. It's carefully vetted. It's carefully written. And, you know, ultimately you have an obligation to publish it, even if you know that some, you know, very special groups of people on Reddit and elsewhere on the Internet are going to absolutely lose their minds. I mean, that is just you can know it and you publish anyway. And I think this is a really good example of that kind of situation for us. Well, I think, you know, it's also important to point out here is, you know, we presented the facts to the DOJ and to the FBI and gave them the opportunity to respond and to clarify what exactly happened here.

17:17Right. And neither agency did. The DOJ referred us to the FBI. The FBI referred us back to the DOJ. We haven't had any clarity on what the process was for compiling this video. Drew, if I'm understanding correctly, after Wired ran its story last Friday about the evidence that showed the video was edited, a couple days later, Attorney General Bondi sort of explained that by saying that there is a flaw in the surveillance system's daily cycle at Metropolitan Correctional Center. She said that one minute is missing from every night's recording, which seems like an entirely plausible explanation. But unfortunately, you know, they've already sort of shot themselves in the foot by claiming the footage was raw when it wasn't.

18:00And now there's this new report you just published in Wired saying, actually, there was this three-minute discrepancy here, too. This is really just going to fuel even more conspiracy theories, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, just to backtrack a bit on that is that, you know, when Attorney General Bondi made the statement about the missing minute, that wasn't in response to Wired's reporting. That was in response to just like a very obvious missing minute that the internet found and immediately latched onto. And a reporter asked her a question about it. But what we found today does sort of call into question the explanation of the missing minute.

18:35You know, what we found is that the first clip that comprises the full quote unquote unedited raw surveillance video, which is made up of two clips, that first clip, the total length of the clip is four hours and 19 minutes, but the final output only used four hours and 16 minutes of it. So there's three minutes of missing footage at the end of that first clip. And it just so turns out that that edit was made basically the frame before the missing minute that Pam Bondi described occurred, right? So we don't know what's on that remaining three minutes, but maybe it's the missing minute, maybe it's not.

19:17The problem is that the DOJ hasn't told us anything. So if I'm hearing you correctly, the first clip extends until after midnight, and the second clip starts at midnight. And when they made the edit, they edited it so that the first clip ends at 11.59. So they introduced the missing minute possibly, or they had an opportunity to cut at midnight and not release a video that had a missing minute and they did not take that opportunity? You know, yeah, I don't want to sort of dive into conspiracy here. So we don't know what's in the last three minutes of the clip that was cut, right? We don't know if it included footage into, you know, August 10th, the following day, or if it cut after the missing minute and, you know, it just was dead air or something that needed to be cut out because it, you know, some artifact of an old surveillance camera.

20:11We just don't know. And these are all questions we brought to the DOJ and they didn't respond. I see. Drew, what has been the most surprising reaction to this or response to this that you've gone on the internet since your stories have been published? Like, are all the conspiracy folks flooding your signal now? Yeah, yeah, I have a very active inbox on both signal and email. Oh, God. And to be fair to everyone who emails me, you know, there's plenty of actually really good tips in there. In fact, this second story about the three minute cut that started from a tip. Someone said, you know, you should check out this aspect of the metadata.

20:54So there's plenty of really good stuff in my inbox. But there's also, you know, a ton of conspiracies. And that's what happens when you report about Epstein. And I think in all seriousness, though, right, the volume of responses here kind of shows how little trust there is in institutions right now, right? Like the vacuum gets filled pretty fast when there's any kind of whiff of inconsistency in a case like Epstein's where people already think the story doesn't quite add up. Right. Well, Drew, thank you so much for coming on and telling us about your reporting on this story. All right. Well, thanks for having me.

21:30We're going to take a quick break, but when we're back, we'll talk about why the Epstein prison tapes have become a wedge issue for one group in particular, Trump supporters.

21:58leave each episode of Morning Brew Daily smarter and ready to take on the world around you. I'm Toby Howell. And I'm Neil Freiman. And we're ready to show you that business news doesn't have to be boring. So join us on Morning Brew Daily, available wherever you get your podcasts. So at the beginning of our conversation, we were talking about why the Epstein case had become this infinite source for conspiracy theories. But who is most invested in these conspiracy theories at this moment? Oh, well, surprise, surprise. It is a significant portion of the right-wing base. So led by key figures in the mega movement, you know, people have been pushing these unsubstantiated claims that Epstein was murdered and that liberal, quote, deep state actors in the government did it essentially to hide his clients' names and all of their awful criminal activities.

22:48So I'm talking about people like Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer. Laura, thank you for sharing our reporting on social. We really appreciate the traffic bump that we got from that. So it's, you know, it's the usual suspects. It's probably who you would expect if you pay much attention to Mega World. But there was this shift last week when the DOJ and the FBI released the memo announcing that these videos would be released, and this one video in particular. The memo also concluded that their investigation into the Epstein case was officially closed and that no foul play was found. That memo also stated that the Epstein client list that Bondi had said was on her desk in February didn't actually exist.

23:29Very special. So as you can probably guess, MAGA figures did not take kindly to those announcements. And, you know, Trump supporters had been expecting some kind of breakthrough, some kind of conspiratorial revelation in this saga. And so they really created the fumes for this conspiracy theory that now they can't put out and is really spiraling out of control. And it's interesting because the MAGA world and the Trump brand really just thrives in conspiracy theories. And it has for a long time. You know, they put into question President Obama's citizenship. There was the whole Pizzagate fiasco.

24:07There is the whole theory that the 2020 election had been stolen. The list goes on. So what went wrong, if you will, with the strategy of doubling down on conspiracy theories in this case? Yeah, this is a good question. Our colleague David Gilbert has been doing a lot of reporting on this, also on Wired.com. And what's interesting is the uproar around Epstein and the fact that folks within the MAGA sort of faction are starting to turn on Trump is really part of like a death by thousand cuts here. There are all kinds of groups that are mad at him for different things right now. And it's being led by different powerful right-wing figures, as Katie pointed out.

24:45You know, there's Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, who was mad about the bombing of Iran. For Loomer, you know, she's a noted conspiracy theorist. It was Trump's acceptance of a luxury plane from Qatar. Ben Shapiro was mad about tariffs. Joe Rogan mad about ICE raids targeting non-criminal migrant workers. Elon Musk eventually got mad at Trump, right? He was his buddy-in-chief, recently left his role in D.C. as a special government employee and has been railing about the big, beautiful bill online. So there are all these different high-profile folks who have been turning on Trump lately, and I think Trump has been upsetting more and more of his base bit by bit.

25:25You know, the Epstein saga touches a slightly different nerve, too, because it is centered on accusations of pedophilia. And also the boogeyman in this case for so long were the Democratic Party. You know, Trump's base was extremely riled up over it. Trump himself used to say that Epstein's death was a cover-up job. Now it turns out that the MAGA folks have reason to believe, whether it's good reason, whether it's valid reason, but reason to believe that Trump himself could possibly be one of the figures in this so-called list. Oh, it's exhausting just thinking about it. You know, it is also worth remembering and I think reinforcing that these conspiracy theories aren't random.

26:03They're not sort of just being pulled out of thin air. A lot of them coalesce actually around one very special conspiracy, QAnon. You may or may not remember it. I mean, that was all the rage a few years ago. But this idea that QAnon championed and, you know, there are still certainly QAnon adherents out there, that there is this sort of shadowy cabal of government elites. It's, you know, they're working to cover up a global child sex trafficking operation. This was really foundational stuff for the mega movement. And, you know, QAnon borrowed from a long tradition of conspiracy theory movements in the U.S.

26:38Think about like satanic panic from the 80s and put those on steroids. So certainly none of this started with the Trump administration. I don't think it will stop with the Trump administration. It really has become sort of embedded into the way of thinking and sort of navigating the world and seeing the world for an unfortunate number of people out there, quite honestly. I'm curious to know what you both think this rift among the right-wing base and the overall proliferation of conspiracy theories means for the political and technological landscape of the country. Conspiracy theories aren't new.