‘Bales’ of docs shredded days after Epstein died

MANHATTAN — AN ANALYSIS OF THOUSANDS of pages of the Epstein files found there were “bales” of documents shredded at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan in the days after notorious sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s death there on Aug. 10, 2019, according to a report published Saturday in the Miami Herald.

“They are shredding everything,” one inmate told a guard. A suspicious corrections officer called the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center 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.”

A back-gate corrections officer wrote on Aug. 19, “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. Can we take a look at the Dumpster ASAP to see if the paper is still there?” But the bags had already been collected, the Miami Herald reported.

Among the unexplained anomalies surrounding Epstein’s death — including a dispute between medical experts on the actual cause of death, the loss of critical physical evidence, corrections officers who failed to make their rounds and unexplained payments to their bank accounts — prosecutors found another issue: “We learned today that all institutional count slips for dates prior to Aug.10, 2019, which we requested on Aug.12, 2019, are apparently ‘missing.’”

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