By her own account, Tova Noel was the last person to see Jeffrey Epstein alive.
In anticipation of her testimony before the House Oversight Committee, (which was postponed Thursday) I nevertheless dug into the Epstein Files and learned about Noel.
I also read her nearly 500-page sworn testimony, taken in 2021 — which was the first and only time she formally gave a statement or was questioned about the night Epstein died.
When she testifies before Congress, it could provide the most detailed accounting yet of Epstein’s last hours — but only if Congress asks the questions that the Justice Department failed to.
Let’s review some of what she said in her 2021 sworn interview and whether it fits the narrative that the Justice Department has now etched into history about Epstein’s suicide.
A refresher: Noel and corrections officer Michael Thomas were the two officers who worked on August 10, 2019 — the night that Epstein was found dead in cell 220L in the Special Housing Unit at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in downtown Manhattan.
Both were charged in November 2019 with falsifying records and defrauding the federal government after it was uncovered that they had failed to make their required rounds (and lied about it).
According to the DOJ’s Epstein files, Noel’s bank had flagged a number of suspicious cash deposits made to her bank accounts around the time of Epstein’s death, including a $5,000 deposit on July 30, 11 days before Epstein died.
But after Epstein’s body was removed from MCC on August 10, Noel and Thomas went home. They didn’t tell any officials what had happened that night.
Two days later, the files show, text messages between the early FBI investigators on the case show they were trying to track them down at their homes.
But it was too late.
The corrections officers refused to speak to investigators on the advice of their attorneys and, until they successfully worked out a federal prosecution agreement, they didn’t say anything.
Under the deal they reached with prosecutors in 2021, the former guards finally agreed to cooperate with the Epstein investigation.
The agency charged with overseeing the probe — the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General — was now working under the assumption that Epstein’s committed suicide. So the only thing left to examine in 2021 was misconduct by corrections officers.
There were no tough questions asked about where they were and when. No questions about the cash deposits to Noel’s bank account that was flagged by her own bank as suspicious.
There was no detailed timeline of what happened. In fact, the agents asking the questions jumped from one topic to another without some questions ever being fully answered.
Now it’s possible, there are other documents that the Justice Department is still keeping under wraps. We know that they have “mistakenly” kept some key documents public.
But in the case of these corrections officers, both of them testified under oathin 2021 that they had never spoken before about the night of Epstein’s death.