A 2020 email recently unearthed from the Justice Department’s release of 3.5 million files on Jeffrey Epstein appears to show a DOJ attorney referring to Epstein’s death – officially ruled a suicide – as a “murder,” a revelation that sparked a frenzy among journalists.Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City, New York on Aug. 10, 2019, and six days later, his death was ruled a suicide by Chief Medical Examiner Barbara Sampson, despite several oddities surrounding the circumstances of his death.In the newly unearthed email, however, an individual who identified themselves as an “AUSA in EDNY” – acronyms for an assistant U.S. attorney working in the Eastern District of New York – made a startling reference to a supposed “investigation” into the “murder” of Epstein, and close to a year after it had already been ruled a suicide.“I'm an AUSA in EDNY and am working on an investigation into the death of an inmate at the Brooklyn MDC,” the email reads, written by the individual – whose name was redacted – identifying themselves as a DOJ attorney, and to a recipient whose name was also redacted.“The [Office of the Chief Medical Examiner] told me that it signed a confidentiality agreement in connection with the investigation into the murder of Jeffrey Epstein. We were hoping to extend a similar agreement and I wanted to see if you could share the agreement (or a boilerplate version of it). I'm happy to speak over the phone if that's easier.”The revelation that Epstein’s death may have been investigated as a murder as late as mid-2020, when President Donald Trump was nearing the end of his first term, rattled several journalists, many of whom on Monday flagged the email in shock.“And there it is,” wrote Italian journalist Alias Vaughn Sunday evening in a social media post on X to their more than 60,000 followers. “We all knew Epstein was murdered back when it happened… and now an email from an Assistant US Attorney confirms that the investigation was into a murder, not suicide.”Others, like Grant Stern, executive editor of Occupy Democrats, noted the timing of the email, which, were the claims within accurate, would mean that “Trump’s DOJ was investigating Jeffrey Epstein’s murder in 2020,” he wrote in a social media post on X to his nearly 200,000 followers.The revelation also stands in direct conflict with the DOJ’s memo released last year concluding that Epstein died by suicide, a finding that sparked outrage among many of Trump’s followers and led to a White House “blowup” from the ensuing fallout.In 2020, one year after Jeffrey Epstein died, an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York discusses a confidentiality agreement "in connection with the investigation into the murder of Jeffrey Epstein."Full file: https://t.co/IMBKsKzjsE pic.twitter.com/JTA7FIc8Sk— Aaron Parnas (@AaronParnas) February 22, 2026