House panel to question Epstein jail guard amid death scrutiny

House lawmakers turned again to the Metropolitan Correctional Center’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein’s final night, seeking to question Tova Noel, the guard believed to have been the last person to see him alive before he was found unresponsive in his Manhattan cell on Aug. 10, 2019.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee requested a transcribed interview with Noel for March 26, 2026, as part of a wider inquiry into whether federal officials have given a complete account of what happened inside the jail. Chairman James Comer said some committee members are not fully convinced Epstein’s death was a suicide, even though the New York City medical examiner ruled it that way. The renewed attention reflects a larger question than Epstein himself: whether the prison system’s staffing, supervision and recordkeeping failures allowed a preventable breakdown to go unexamined.

Noel and another guard, Michael Thomas, were charged in November 2019 with falsifying records after prosecutors said no count of prisoners in the Special Housing Unit took place from about 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 9 until about 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10. The two later reached a deal with prosecutors, and the case was dropped in December 2021. Their conduct has remained central to public skepticism because the missing count left Epstein effectively unattended for hours inside a federal jail already under intense scrutiny.

Newly released Justice Department materials have added to that pressure. Reporting on the files said Noel’s bank account received about $12,000 in cash deposits between April 2018 and July 2019, with the last reported deposit arriving 10 days before Epstein died. The materials also reportedly showed a browser search for “latest on Epstein in jail.” At the same time, DOJ grand jury transcripts released earlier in 2026 reportedly showed the FBI found no evidence of a bribe in Noel’s bank records, and Noel told the Justice Department inspector general that she did not remember searching for Epstein online, though she may have read an article about him.

The committee’s Epstein probe has already reached former Attorney General Bill Barr, former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, Ghislaine Maxwell, Les Wexner, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Richard Kahn. Darren Indyke was scheduled for deposition on March 19, 2026. By calling Noel back to the center of the investigation, lawmakers are testing whether the official record still holds, or whether the jail’s failures on Epstein’s last night remain more revealing than the death itself.