Speaking of confessions, when I saw this headline in the New York Post this morning, I’ll confess that I thought we were about to experience an “Aha” moment. Two of the guards charged with guarding pedophile rapist Jeffrey Epstein have confessed, but they’re going to avoid jail time. Tova Noel and Michael Thomas have cut a plea deal, though it wasn’t for murder or even being tangentially involved in killing Epstein. What they have confessed to is essentially being bad at their jobs. The two guards have admitted that they falsified prison records indicating that they had been checking on their prisoner every thirty minutes as required, instead, remaining at their desks engaged in online shopping and napping. They will voluntarily perform 100 hours of community service each.

The two jail employees tasked with guarding pedophile Jeffrey Epstein the night of his suicide in a Manhattan jail have admitted to falsifying records — but will skirt time behind bars under a deal with prosecutors.

Tova Noel and Michael Thomas admitted that they “willfully and knowingly” lied on forms stating that they’d made the required rounds checking on inmates the night of Epstein’s August 2019 suicide

Prosecutors said the guards were sleeping and surfing the web when they should have been monitoring the maximum security federal prisoner, who had recently been on suicide watch at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

There was obviously a bit of sympathy for the two guards on the part of the court. Shortly after we learned of Epstein’s passage from this life, it was revealed that the Metropolitan Correctional Center was so badly understaffed that the guards were regularly working twelve-hour shifts for as much as ten days straight. They were probably exhausted. That doesn’t entirely excuse their actions (or lack thereof) of course, but it’s at least understandable how they might be tempted to take a catnap.

It was probably the coroner’s report that did the two men in. By the time someone was called in to examine Epstein, it was reported that he had been dead for quite a while. Had the guards been making their rounds on the required schedule, they might have caught him in the acted and prevented his death or at least reached him quickly enough to revive him.

Of course, all of this speculation depends on whether or not you have been fully convinced that Epstein actually did take his own life. You’ll recall that a separate medical examiner hired by Epstein’s family was present for the autopsy and noted the unusual fact that the prisoner had sustained fractures to his larynx and hyoid bone. Dr. Michael Baden, formerly a Chief Medical Examiner for New York City, testified that he had never seen those types of fractures in a suicide victim in 50 years of practice. Of course, he was also forced to admit that those injuries could not conclusively prove that Epstein had been strangled, either.

In addition to community service, the two guards have also agreed to cooperate in an ongoing federal probe. The saga of how Jeffrey Epstein went from being a confidant of billionaires and powerful political figures to a corpse hanging in a Manhattan jail cell is apparently still not over. But for what it’s worth, a poll conducted after the initial findings of medical authorities were released showed that barely one-third of Americans believed that Epstein actually killed himself.