In the aftermath of the suicide of billionaire and accused pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in federal custody on Saturday there has been plenty of finger pointing, some of it serious, some of it conspiratorial. MSNBC's The Beat host Ari Melber joined Stephanie Ruhle on Monday morning's MSNBC Live to point the finger at President Trump and Attorney General Barr.

Melber was not convinced of Barr's anger that Epstein was allowed to kill himself at the Manhattan Correctional Center, "The Attorney General says he is appalled. The Attorney General is in charge of the Justice Department and Bureau of Prisons. This is like that thing when sometimes when Donald Trump says can you believe what the federal government is up to and you want to say, you run the federal government."

This is a less conspiratorial version of the argument fellow MSNBC host Joy Reid offered over the weekend: Donald Trump runs the federal government, Bill Bar runs the DOJ, ergo it's their fault Epstein died before his victims could justice and before he ratted out any co-conspirators. However contrary to Melber's accusation of "whataboutism and blame shifting," the Attorney General can't micromanage the day-to-day operations at MCC anymore than the Secretary of Defense does at any military base, here or abroad.

Melber was not done blaming Trump and Barr, saying budget cuts may have had something to do with it: "If the are not....funding and staffing the Bureau of Prisons appropriately, that goes to the systemic part." He added: "They had a deputy-director vacancy for a while. This takes us back to bigger things that are a little more intricate, which is Donald Trump's lack of interest in staffing and funding his own cabinet, his own agencies."

Melber ended on a much more conspiratorial note, trying to cover himself with the "just asking questions" excuse he declared that the BOP's budget and understaffing when added to "the questions about as we’re looking on the screen, the fact that he had a history with this person" as "[t]he Clintons did" too.

What Trump, Barr, accusations of underfunding and understaffing at the BOP have to do with being taken off suicide watch and guards not performing their routine 30 minute checks is a question that was not answered.

Here is a transcript for the August 12 show: