New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the U.S. Department of Justice failed to meet a July 31 deadline he had set for the department to share unredacted investigative records related to the abuse of girls at Jeffrey Epstein’s former Zorro Ranch, and he has not ruled out legal action to compel their release.
Torrez reopened a dormant criminal investigation into the remote 10,000-acre property outside New Mexico in February. His office asked the DOJ in the same month for access to federal files. In a July 14 letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Torrez said he would “pursue all available legal remedies without further notice” if the deadline passed, having made “repeated, documented, good-faith efforts to obtain the unredacted investigative records in the USDOJ’s custody.” In an interview with Albuquerque ABC affiliate KOAT the same week, Torrez said: “I’m not taking anything off the table. I’m not ruling out a lawsuit.”
Torrez said that despite promises of cooperation from Blanche and Jay Clayton, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who is now director designate of national intelligence, only 31 pages were ever handed over. He said those were mostly old news clippings and heavily redacted pages of little use to state investigators.
Unlike other properties central to Epstein’s sex-trafficking conspiracy — in Palm Beach, New York, and on his private Caribbean island — no federal search of the ranch was ever confirmed to have taken place. Epstein died in jail in New York in August 2019 while awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges.
According to Torrez, the Southern District of New York, which led the original Epstein investigation, called him in July to announce that it would not cooperate. The New Mexico US attorney’s office said in a statement that it had “substantively responded” to Torrez’s request on June 30 by emailing the 31 documents. The office said it “did not lead or handle the Zorro Ranch investigation and therefore neither collected nor retained any investigative materials.”
Clayton, during his confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate last month, told Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, that “my folks, I think as we speak, are seeking dialogue with the attorney general to see if we can reach an accommodation.” Clayton noted the documents were subject to certain protective orders, namely redactions to hide the identities of victims.
Blanche, who was accused by Democrats in February of a “full-blown cover-up” of the Epstein files, told his own confirmation hearing last month that he was “continuing to work” with the New Mexico Department of Justice. Torrez said he had heard nothing further from either Blanche or the SDNY.
Torrez told MSNBC’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki” on July 23 that he was annoyed by months of stonewalling. “It appears that the administration has been really focused on the management of communications around the Epstein case, rather than acting in a way that demonstrates a commitment to getting to the truth and getting to accountability,” Torrez said.
He expressed particular frustration with the SDNY’s conduct after the original state investigation, launched by his predecessor Hector Balderas in February 2019, was shelved. “We stood down that investigation at the explicit request of the southern district of New York, and so to have them fail to honor their agreement and then not give us access to this file is extremely unusual, and it’s complicating our ability to advance this criminal investigation,” Torrez said.
Torrez added that Blanche “has the authority right now, with the stroke of a pen, to grant us this access, to let us, our investigators and prosecutors, come and take a look at the files, identify co-conspirators, witnesses, corroborating evidence, identify new potential leads. Every day that goes by that that doesn’t happen is another day that we’ve delayed delivering justice for the survivors.”