New Mexico sues US Justice Department for impeding Epstein probe

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In Wednesday’s court filing, New Mexico’s Attorney General Raul Torrez once again accused the Department of Justice of unlawfully withholding unredacted materials. Those materials, he argued, are critical to the state’s investigations into Epstein’s activities at the Zorro Ranch, a sprawling property the late financier once owned in New Mexico. “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 press release. “Their delay is actively hurting our criminal investigation and delaying justice Epstein survivors deserve.” The lawsuit escalates a feud between Torrez, a Democrat, and the Republican administration of US President Donald Trump. Their spat has been building for months. In early July, Torrez released a letter he sent to the Justice Department the previous month, expressing frustration that, despite “verbal assurances of cooperation”, the federal government had failed to provide access to the relevant documents. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, has argued that privacy law prevents it from providing state officials with unredacted documents from its Epstein file. “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. Questions about Epstein’s activities at the Zorro Ranch stretch back years. He owned the ranch from 1993 until his death in 2019. During that time, the wealthy financier was accused of orchestrating a sex-trafficking ring whose victims are thought to number in the hundreds. Survivors like the late Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in 2025, have warned that crimes took place at the Zorro Ranch. A conservative talk show host also approached the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after he said he received an anonymous tip about sexual abuse on the site, as well as “the location of two foreign girls buried on Zorro Ranch”. That tip has yet to be corroborated. New Mexico had first opened an investigation into the ranch in February 2019. But by July of that year, the Department of Justice had asked New Mexico to stand down and transfer any information it gathered to federal authorities. At the time, the Justice Department was pursuing its own investigation into Epstein, and it arrested him on charges of trafficking minors for sex and engaging in a conspiracy to commit such sex trafficking. Later that month, while awaiting trial in a New York City jail cell, Epstein was found dead, in an incident that was ruled a suicide. From then on, Torrez said the investigation into Zorro Ranch languished. The vast property was sold in August 2023, and it is currently owned by businessman Don Huffines, a former member of the Texas Senate. “Federal law enforcement failed to ever search Zorro Ranch,” Wednesday’s lawsuit reads. “[The Department of Justice] likewise failed to make any attempt to seize Zorro Ranch and Epstein’s associated New Mexico property and failed to do anything else to preserve or gather evidence of Epstein’s crimes in New Mexico.” The Epstein case, however, surged back into the public spotlight in 2025, after Donald Trump was re-elected as US president. His second administration contained several prominent members who had spread conspiracy theories about the Epstein case, including that there was a secret, unreleased “client list” used to blackmail powerful figures. Despite former Attorney General Pam Bondi initially telling Fox News she had the list on her desk, both she and FBI Director Kash Patel later denied any such document existed. Trump’s own ties with Epstein helped fuel renewed interest in the case. The two socialised together in the 1990s and early 2000s, before severing ties. Trump has said their falling-out had to do with Epstein poaching workers from the Mar-a-Lago spa, and he has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. Still, critics have questioned how Epstein could have avoided justice for so long. His one conviction came in 2008 for the solicitation of a minor — and he served only 13 months of an 18-month sentence, in what some have described as an overly lenient plea deal. That scrutiny ignited a bipartisan push last November to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the Department of Justice to release its Epstein-related files in a searchable format within 30 days. The law required limited redactions, save for the protection of victims’ identities. The Justice Department ultimately released millions of Epstein-related files in January, but several members of Congress have accused the department of failing to comply with the law in its entirety. Some documents, they say, were redacted without cause, while other documents revealed the identities of survivors. In February, New Mexico reopened its investigation into Zorro Ranch. It said the newly released Epstein files included more than 13,000 references to the property and roughly 5,000 references to the state as a location “where victims were trafficked, groomed, and assaulted”. Despite that evidence, Torrez said the Department of Justice failed to follow through with its “express assurances” to help with the state’s Epstein investigation. In Wednesday’s lawsuit, his legal team argued that further delay in accessing the unredacted files could pervert the pursuit of justice. “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 said. “Federal inaction does not merely stall the investigation; it prolongs and compounds the suffering of survivors.” The lawsuit has been filed with the US District Court in Washington, DC. 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