Former Attorney General Bill Barr shared President Trump's stunned reaction to finding out that Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell.
Barr was the head of the Justice Department when Epstein, who was facing sex trafficking charges, died at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.
"I called [the president] up and said, ‘You better brace for this,’ and I told him words to that effect, and I told him about it and told him we were going to be investigating it very vigorously,” Barr told the House Oversight Committee.
“He had the same reaction I did, which was, ‘How the hell did that happen, he’s in federal custody?"
Barr's comments come from a recent deposition with the House Oversight Committee, which launched a new probe into Epstein after attorney general Pam Bondi controversially moved to close the case this summer.
Democrats have insinuated that Trump is covering up the truth about Epstein, who was once friends with Trump.
Barr told the Oversight Committee that he had two conversations about Epstein with Trump, and in one of those talks, Trump had said "something to the effect that he had broken off with Epstein long ago and that he had actually pushed him out of Mar-a-Lago."
They also conversed in the immediate aftermath of Epstein's suicide. Trump told Barr, at the time, that he believed Epstein's death would cause "conspiracy theories."
At the time, Barr had said that a "perfect storm of screw-ups" allowed Epstein to take his own life. The sheer number of things that went wrong - from cameras not working, to Epstein being taken off suicide watch and not being checked on properly - led many to speculate that foul play was involved.
Barr spent much of his interview with the House Oversight Committee rebutting those theories and explaining why, in his view, Epstein "absolutely" killed himself.
Only one camera was recording on the night Epstein died, and it does not provide a complete view of the stairs leading to Epstein's cell block. Barr conceded that the video has a "blind spot," but he said it still would have been impossible for anyone to enter the cell undetected.
"It was my judgment, from what I saw on the camera and what I looked at, I didn’t think it was possible for someone to get up to the tier and open the door without being picked up in the camera,” he said.
An intruder would have had to pass through two sets of doors, one of which was opened by a remote control. The second "heavy, steel door" required a key and would have made a loud noise, Barr said.
A plan to kill Epstein would have required a high level of coordination between "two dozen" people acting in a very short time window, Barr speculated.
"And all these people were in different groups -- you know, the people who were repairing the cameras, the people who, you know, were responsible for opening and closing the door, the people who were responsible for putting in a new cellmate, things like that. For all that to be coordinated, it would've required, I think, as I say, maybe two dozen people."
