ANALYSIS/OPINION:

It’s not that something is rotten in this Jeffrey Epstein suicide-in-a-federal-jail-cell story that is oh, so slowly unfolding on Park Row in Manhattan.

It’s that everything about it is rotten.

Why haven’t we seen video or photos of his cell and the area surrounding it to ascertain whether someone entered the cell and murdered him?

Come on! Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center personnel found him dead in his cell on Aug. 10. That’s five — count ‘em, five — days ago at this writing. Those videos should have been made public within five hours.

What? Authorities are carefully viewing and reviewing them?

Oh, come on! Enough time has passed to view 70 full-length Hollywood movies, with bathroom breaks.

The prison cameras weren’t working? Were they broken? Not turned on? Coincidence? Sniff, sniff. What’s that rotten odor?

You can’t help wondering whether it’s taking five days for somebody to photoshop those pictures in case it suddenly leaks that they exist. See that shadowy figure creep into Epstein’s cell and strangle him with a bed sheet brought into the cell? Look again. No shadowy figure. How do they do that?

Why does the official report of his death claim it was suicide by a bedsheet wrapped around his neck and hitched to his bunk bed? Really?

Yeah, we know P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. Maybe. But not enough minutes, not enough suckers to hide this rottenness.

Experts have repeatedly told us his bedsheets would have been made of paper to prevent suicide.

What’s up with that? How many “Oh come ons” does this column deserve?

Attorney General William P. Barr seemed genuinely angry that federal prison authorities let this happen, growling convincingly that he would get to the bottom of it all.

What, is this story’s well bottomless, like the public’s distrust of all things government?

The autopsy revealed broken neck bones associated with murder by strangulation more than with suicide.

As for Epstein’s multitude of very wealthy, very high-profile friends on whom he had the sexploitation goods, did they buy off half the federal and New York legal-penal system? Or all of it?

Where did Epstein learn precisely how to hang himself from a bunkbed? Do you know how? Do you know anybody else who knows how? Did Jeffrey go to some fancy bunkbed-suicide school in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he has an island of his own? Hint: there is no such school. Not in the USVI. Not in any one of the 50 United States. Not anywhere on the planet, period.

This whole thing is already so rotten that it’s beyond repair when it comes to public trust.

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