Asked about the death of Jeffrey Epstein, John Kiriakou answered by reciting the procedure that is supposed to prevent a death of that kind, and then marking off each place where it was not followed.
What the protocol requires
If somebody is suicidal or thought to be suicidal, he said, he is supposed to be placed in a room with windows on four sides. Volunteer prisoners then sit there in a chair, staring at him, in four-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day, to make sure that he does not kill himself. And he is not given sheets: his sheets are made of paper, so that he cannot tie a knot and hang himself. [1]
What failed
Kiriakou says he set this out for a friend who was convinced Epstein had been murdered, telling him to look at it one step at a time. The guards are not supposed to work more than eight hours; both of the guards on that unit had worked double shifts of sixteen hours, because the institution was short-staffed. That is number one. Number two, the camera was broken — and, he adds, all the cameras are broken. [2] [3] Every step of the way, he concluded, there was a breakdown. [1]
Asked whether the breakdown might have been intentional, he said that is a different question, and then answered it in one word: probably. [4]
Why he thinks the man would have done it
Kiriakou also addressed motive, and did so in the register of leadership profiling rather than of scandal. For a sociopath, he said, it would be a rather easy decision, devoid of emotion, in which the man would consider only the practicalities: he was almost sixty years old, looking at a probable second offence and perhaps twenty-five or twenty-seven years, and people convicted of sex offences against children are not eligible for minimum security work camps. He was going to be in prison for the rest of his days — and so, in that calculation, it is better to be dead. [5] [6]
His own conclusion about the secrecy, shared with his interviewer, was that the government should simply lay out the evidence, at which point everybody would walk away — but that they will not. [6]