Epstein prison guard to testify in front of House Oversight Committee today

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A corrections officer who was on duty when Jeffrey Epstein died in a New York City prison cell in August 2019 is set to testify before the House Oversight Committee on Monday.

Tova Noel told federal investigators that she believes she was the last person to see the convicted sex offender alive at the Metropolitan Correctional Center before he killed himself. Noel and Michael Thomas, the other corrections officer assigned to monitor Epstein that night, initially faced criminal charges for falsifying records related to that shift, but the charges were dropped after the pair reached deals with prosecutors in 2021. Both were fired from their jobs.

Noel’s and Thomas’ prosecution agreements included their cooperation with a government investigation into Epstein’s death. The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General released its report on that investigation in July 2023, finding “numerous and serious failures by MCC New York staff constituting misconduct and dereliction of their duties.”

Documents produced by the Justice Department reveal that FBI investigators probed Google searches by Noel the morning of Epstein’s death, including for “latest on Epstein in jail” less than an hour before he was found dead.

“I don’t remember doing that,” Noel said of the Google searches in her sworn statement to the DOJ in 2021.