New Mexico sues Justice Department over Epstein ranch records

New Mexico sued the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday, accusing federal officials of withholding records the state says are critical to its criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s activities at a remote ranch south of Santa Fe.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., names the Justice Department and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez says the department has “stonewalled” requests for unredacted investigative materials tied to Epstein’s former Zorro Ranch, a 10,000-acre property about 30 miles south of Santa Fe.

“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,” Torrez said in a statement. “Their delay is actively hurting our criminal investigation and delaying justice Epstein survivors deserve.”

Epstein, a financier and convicted sex offender, bought the ranch in 1993 from the estate of former New Mexico Gov. Bruce King. He owned it until his death in 2019 while awaiting trial in New York on federal child sex-trafficking charges. The death was ruled a suicide.

New Mexico first opened an investigation into the ranch in February 2019, but Torrez says it was later paused at the request of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, who were leading the federal Epstein case. According to Al Jazeera, the Justice Department asked New Mexico in July 2019 to stand down and transfer any information it had gathered to federal authorities.

Torrez reopened the state investigation in February after the release of Epstein-related files that he said included more than 13,000 references to Zorro Ranch and roughly 5,000 references to New Mexico as a place “where victims were trafficked, groomed, and assaulted.” The Guardian reported that recent releases also included numerous photographs of men and young girls at the ranch, and that survivors had previously testified about sexual and physical abuse there by Epstein and others.

The lawsuit says federal law enforcement never searched Zorro Ranch and did not seize the property or other New Mexico assets connected to Epstein. “Federal law enforcement failed to ever search Zorro Ranch,” the filing says, according to Al Jazeera. It also says the department “failed to do anything else to preserve or gather evidence of Epstein’s crimes in New Mexico.”

Tensions between Torrez and federal officials have been building for months. In a July 14 letter to Blanche, Torrez said he would “pursue all available legal remedies without further notice” if the department did not provide the requested materials by July 31. He said his office had made “repeated, documented, good-faith efforts to obtain the unredacted investigative records in the DoJ’s custody.”

The U.S. attorney’s office for New Mexico told The Guardian last week that it had “substantively responded” to Torrez’s request on June 30 by emailing 31 documents. Torrez said those records were mostly old news clippings and heavily redacted pages of little use to investigators.

The Justice Department has said privacy law prevents it from giving state officials unredacted Epstein files. “To capitulate to their demands would be to break federal law. Is that what the [New Mexico Attorney General] is suggesting?” the department said in a statement last month, according to Al Jazeera.

Torrez’s lawsuit asks the court to declare that Blanche and the Justice Department acted illegally by refusing to turn over evidence about events at Zorro Ranch. It also seeks an order requiring compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act and federal regulations governing agency responses to document requests in litigation.

That transparency law, passed last November, required the Justice Department to release Epstein-related files in searchable form within 30 days, with limited redactions to protect victims’ identities. The department released millions of files in January, but some members of Congress have accused it of failing to fully comply.

“Attorney General Torrez has marched through every bureaucratic hoop [Department of Justice] has demanded, only to have years of promised federal cooperation turned into bureaucratic defiance,” the lawsuit says. “Federal inaction does not merely stall the investigation; it prolongs and compounds the suffering of survivors.”