The Department of Justice was handed a legal deadline, a transparency law signed by Donald Trump himself, and a very explicit warning from the New Mexico attorney general. It responded by emailing a bunch of old news clippings and then going quiet. Now it's getting sued.
What the Feds Were Supposed to Hand Over
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed suit on Wednesday against the DOJ and acting attorney general Todd Blanche in the US district court for the district of Columbia, alleging that the department has been 'stonewalling' the state's active criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch. The Guardian obtained and reviewed the filing.
The Zorro Ranch is a 10,000-acre property about 30 miles south of Santa Fe that Epstein bought in 1993 from the estate of Democratic former New Mexico governor Bruce King. Unlike Epstein's Palm Beach mansion, his New York townhouse, or his private Caribbean island, the Zorro property never saw a confirmed federal search. That's a gap that has looked worse and worse as the so-called Epstein files have come out, mentioning the ranch thousands of times and including photographs of men and young girls taken there over the years.
Torrez reopened the state's criminal investigation into the ranch in February, after that files release. Multiple survivors have given testimony about sexual and physical abuse they experienced at Zorro at the hands of Epstein and others. The attorney general wanted the federal government's investigative records. He asked nicely. He asked repeatedly. He set a deadline of July 31. And then he waited.
The DOJ's Response: Technically Something, Substantively Nothing
The US attorney's office for the district of New Mexico told The Guardian last week that it had 'substantively responded' to Torrez's request on June 30 by sending over 31 documents. Substantively responded. That's a phrase that's doing a lot of heavy lifting in this story.
Torrez says those 31 documents were mostly old news clippings and heavily redacted pages of essentially no use to state investigators. So the DOJ's defense is going to be, presumably, that they technically sent something. That's the standard we're working with. That's the bar.
If that wasn't enough, Torrez also disclosed in a July 14 social media post that the southern district of New York prosecutors, who led the previous federal Epstein investigation and previously asked New Mexico to mothball its own probe, have now told him they 'will not cooperate' with the state's investigation. The same federal prosecutors who asked a state to stand down so the feds could handle it are now refusing to cooperate with the state they told to stand down. Try to square that circle.
The Legal Hook Torrez Is Pulling
This is not Torrez improvising. He warned Blanche directly in a July 14 letter that he would 'pursue all available legal remedies without further notice' if July 31 came and went without compliance. July 31 came and went. Wednesday, he filed.
The lawsuit demands the court declare that Blanche and the DOJ acted illegally in refusing to produce evidence about events at Zorro Ranch. It also asks the court to order compliance with both the Epstein transparency law, signed by Donald Trump in November, and the so-called Touhy regulations, which govern how federal agencies are supposed to handle document requests during litigation. Plus costs. And whatever else the court thinks is fair.
The transparency law is the part that deserves a second look. Trump signed it. The law compels the government to release what it knows about Epstein's crimes and activities. Democrats and critics have accused Blanche of burying or heavily redacting much of what's covered by that law. And now the DOJ is being sued for allegedly ignoring both the law and a state criminal investigation simultaneously. That's not stonewalling as a rhetorical flourish. That's stonewalling as a legal allegation in federal court.
Why Zorro Ranch Specifically Matters
Epstein died in August 2019 in a New York jail while awaiting trial on federal child sex-trafficking charges. His other properties got significant scrutiny, both before and after his death. Zorro Ranch got almost none, at least from the federal side.
Torrez has said he wants to establish definitively what happened at the ranch, building on the investigation that his predecessor Hector Balderas first opened in February 2019 before federal prosecutors at the southern district of New York asked the state to shelve it. That's right: the feds told New Mexico to back off, ran their own case, watched Epstein die in custody, and now won't cooperate when New Mexico tries to pick the investigation back up. The logic of that sequence is not immediately apparent.
The survivor testimony about Zorro, combined with the thousands of references in the Epstein files and the photographic evidence included in those releases, has made the ranch a central unanswered question in the broader Epstein story. Torrez is trying to answer it. The DOJ appears to be in the business of preventing that from happening, and now a federal judge is going to be asked to weigh in on whether that's legal.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that a department handed a transparency law, a state criminal investigation, a documented paper trail of good-faith requests, a hard deadline, and a written warning somehow couldn't manage to produce anything more useful than old newspaper clippings. You are supposed to believe this was an administrative oversight and not a deliberate strategy. Sure.
Todd Blanche, for those keeping score, is the same attorney general who represented Donald Trump in criminal proceedings before becoming Trump's attorney general. He now runs the department that is sitting on files about a child sex-trafficking operation at a ranch that never got searched. The department he runs was legally compelled, by a law his boss signed, to release those files. And his response to a state attorney general's investigation was to send over some clippings and go dark. There will be people who look at all of that and see nothing suspicious. Those people are either not paying attention or they've made a choice.
Raúl Torrez is doing exactly what an attorney general is supposed to do. He documented the requests, he set the deadline, he gave the warning, and when the federal government called his bluff, he filed. A federal judge will now have to decide whether the DOJ can legally run out the clock on a state sex-trafficking investigation by pleading busyness and mailing over redacted clippings. The answer to that question should be obvious. In this administration, nothing is obvious.
Comments