Famed reporter flags ‘gravity’ of latest move in Epstein probe: ‘They dropped the ball’

The House Oversight Committee on Friday requested that Tova Noel – one of the prison guards tasked with monitoring Jeffrey Epstein during his brief 2019 detention before his mysterious death – appear before lawmakers to testify as part of its ongoing probe into the disgraced financier, a development one famed reporter described as carrying significant “gravity.”

Noel has come under scrutiny in recent days after newly released Justice Department files revealed that she had made suspicious internet searches in the moments leading up to the discovery of Epstein’s body, with his death controversially ruled a suicide. The files also revealed that she had made a “mysterious $5,000 cash deposit” 10 days before Epstein’s death, a deposit that was flagged by her own bank as suspicious.

Now, House Oversight Committee members are asking Noel to testify before lawmakers, but for Julie K. Brown, the famed Miami Herald journalist whose reporting helped lead to the arrests of both Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, the development also represents a major failure on the part of the DOJ.

“There was so much corruption going on at the Metropolitan Correctional Center that any reasonable person would think that a suspicious death of such a high-profile figure like Epstein would have been thoroughly investigated,” Brown wrote Friday on her Substack, The Epstein files by Julie K. Brown.

“In other words, if there were corrections officers and commanders on the take, then isn’t it possible one or more of them could have been paid to look the other way when Epstein was executed? But just like the DOJ dropped the effort to search Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico in 2019, it appears that they also dropped the ball on pursuing some of the tips they received about Epstein’s death.”

Among the DOJ’s newly released files is a transcript of an FBI report documenting an interview with a fellow inmate of Epstein’s. As first reported last weekend by Brown in the Miami Herald, the inmate told the FBI that they had heard “guards talking about covering up Jeffrey Epstein’s death on the morning he died." That inmate also said that other inmates began saying, “Miss Noel killed Jeffrey.”

As Brown noted, however, the interview appears to have gone unpursued by the Justice Department, with no clear explanation for why investigators failed to follow up.