Competing claims emerge over DOJ response to state records request
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accuses the DOJ of “stonewalling” Torrez’s investigation and alleges that the federal government took steps that “actively harms victims and undermines the public interest.” Torrez and his senior prosecutors “have faced sustained resistance” to the kind of information-sharing that had previously occurred between state and federal investigators, according to the Associated Press. The complaint also seeks costs and “such other and further relief as the Court deems just and proper,” The Guardian reported.
At the center of the dispute are competing accounts of what the DOJ provided. Torrez said in a July 14 letter to Blanche that he had made “repeated, documented, good-faith efforts to obtain the unredacted investigative records in the DoJ’s custody,” and warned he would “pursue all available legal remedies without further notice” if a July 31 deadline he set passed without compliance. The U.S. attorney’s office countered that it had “substantively responded” on June 30 by emailing 31 documents. Torrez characterized the response as “mostly old news clippings and heavily redacted pages of little use.”
The filing also arrived the same day New Mexico released a report showing preliminary findings from its ongoing probe into Epstein and the ranch.
The lawsuit follows Torrez’s reopening of the investigation in February, after Zorro Ranch was mentioned thousands of times in recent releases of the Epstein files. Those files were compelled into public release by a transparency act signed by Donald Trump in November. Democrats and critics have accused Blanche of covering up many of the files, The Guardian reported.
Torrez has said he wanted to establish what took place at the ranch, which, unlike other properties prominent in Epstein’s sex-trafficking network — including locations in Palm Beach, New York, and a private Caribbean island — saw no confirmed federal search. The investigation was initially opened by Hector Balderas, Torrez’s predecessor as New Mexico attorney general, in February 2019, before being mothballed at the request of federal prosecutors at the Southern District of New York, which led a previous Epstein investigation. Those same prosecutors told Torrez last month that they “will not cooperate” in the New Mexico investigation, he said in a social media post on July 14.
Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch in 1993 from the estate of former New Mexico Governor Bruce King, according to The Guardian. Numerous photographs of men and young girls taken at the property in subsequent years featured in the latest Epstein files release, and survivors gave testimony about sexual and physical abuse they were subjected to at the ranch by Epstein and others. Epstein died in a New York jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial on child sex-trafficking charges.
The Guardian has contacted the justice department for comment on Wednesday’s filing.