New Mexico rips feds for stonewalling probe into Epstein ranch

The Justice Department defended its conduct as consistent with court orders in place to protect victims’ privacy and with the bipartisan Epstein Transparency Act, calling New Mexico’s sweeping requests unjustified.WASHINGTON (CN) — New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday claiming it’s stonewalling the state’s criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s conduct at his “Zorro Ranch” outside Santa Fe.Torrez says that in 2019 the state agreed to stand down on Epstein-related investigations until federal investigators completed their probe, which resulted in the state giving up timely access to witnesses, victims and other evidence.When the state made the agreement, Torrez says it had no reason to believe federal law enforcement would break their promise and “deviate from historical practice just to block their state counterparts from successfully investigating child sexual abuse under state law.”“New Mexico has a duty to protect survivors and investigate crimes committed in our state so that perpetrators can be held accountable,” Torrez said in a statement. “We asked the Department of Justice to cooperate by providing access to records that may be critical to identifying victims, witnesses and additional criminal conduct at Zorro Ranch. Their delay is actively hurting our criminal investigation and delaying justice Epstein survivors deserve.”In the 40-page lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Torrez asks a federal judge to order the Justice Department to “abandon their unlawful noncooperation policy” and to comply with the New Mexico Department of Justice’s investigative demands.The Justice Department rejected Torrez’s assertion that it has violated the law in any way and defended its actions as an effort to protect victim privacy.“The Epstein Files Transparency Act does not require, and the protective orders in place in the Southern District of New York do not permit, disclosure of victim-identifying information carte blanche, and New Mexico has provided no lawful basis to justify such sweeping disclosures,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in an email. “Protecting victim privacy remains a top priority for the department, and neither Touhy requests nor a desire to cooperate outweighs that privacy. DOJ remains available to assist New Mexico’s investigation consistent with the law and binding court orders.”According to Torrez, Epstein used Zorro Ranch regularly over the course of 25 years, with thousands of references throughout the Justice Department’s publicly released Epstein library. The state reopened its investigation in February 2026, with an initial search of Zorro Ranch on March 9.“[The Justice Department] has betrayed survivors and the public related to Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators at least three times,” Torrez argues. “First, DOJ secretly negotiated a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein without consulting survivors.”He pointed to the 11th Circuit case regarding Epstein survivor Courtney Wild, who sought to sue the federal government for violating the Crime Victims’ Rights Act by failing to inform her of a 2007 nonprosecution agreement with Epstein.The agreement was part of his guilty plea on crimes of solicitation of prostitution in Florida, where the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida agreed not to prosecute him for any further offenses that would arise from federal investigations into his conduct.While the 11th Circuit ruled against Wild — finding the statute only applied to pretrial criminal proceedings — it nonetheless slammed the government’s conduct as working “hand-in-hand with Epstein’s lawyers” and their efforts seeming to have “graduate from passive nondisclosure to (or at least close to) active misrepresentation.”Further, Torrez says the Justice Department’s conduct runs afoul of the bipartisan Epstein Transparency Act, which required public disclosure of redacted investigative documents by the end of 2025.“Now, DOJ and acting Attorney General [Todd] Blanche are refusing to facilitate the investigation of state law crimes by hiding information about Epstein and his co-conspirators from Attorney General Torrez and state law enforcement, when New Mexico is one of the few jurisdictions that still may have an opportunity to hold Epstein’s associates accountable or otherwise provide some sense of justice to survivors,” Torrez says in the lawsuit.“Attorney General Torrez has marched through every bureaucratic hoop DOJ has demanded only to have years of promised federal cooperation turned into bureaucratic defiance. Federal inaction does not merely stall the investigation; it prolongs and compounds the suffering of survivors.”In June, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington determined the Justice Department had effectively conceded it violated the Epstein Transparency Act by failing to address allegations from independent journalist Katie Phang in a Freedom of Information lawsuit seeking broader access to the records.Torrez says he sent a letter to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi on March 13 seeking the unredacted copies of five specific documents in the Epstein Files and general access to materials related to Zorro Ranch. Torrez asked for a response by March 27, but received no reply.On April 1, Associate Deputy Attorney General Diego Pestana said in direct communications with New Mexico that the Justice Department was willing to cooperate with the state’s investigation, but demanded the state submit formal Touhy requests to the FBI’s New Mexico Field Office, which the state did.The state made the request on May 3 and has received no substantive response over 100 days later, Torrez says.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads