By Kevin Hendricks
New Mexico’s top prosecutor is taking the U.S. Department of Justice to federal court, accusing the agency of blocking access to unredacted Epstein investigative files the state says it needs to finish a criminal probe of Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch.
Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed the complaint Aug. 5 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and USDOJ. The suit claims USDOJ’s refusal to hand over unredacted records violates the Administrative Procedure Act and interferes with New Mexico’s authority to investigate crimes committed in its own borders.
The complaint says federal prosecutors asked New Mexico to stand down its own Zorro Ranch investigation in 2019, promising to share relevant findings once the federal case wrapped up. New Mexico turned over its full investigative file that September. USDOJ never delivered on the exchange, according to the filing, even after Epstein’s death and Ghislaine Maxwell’s 2021 conviction.
New Mexico reopened its investigation in February and searched Zorro Ranch in March. The complaint says the publicly released Epstein Files contain more than 13,000 references to the ranch and roughly 5,000 to New Mexico, but the versions of specific documents state investigators have requested remain redacted. NMDOJ sent a formal records request in May; the complaint says months passed with little more than boilerplate objections and a promise of cooperation that never materialized.
In a statement announcing the suit, Torrez said the delay was actively hurting the state’s criminal investigation. The complaint separately quotes Torrez’s June 30 letter to Blanche arguing USDOJ holds “the very records that would allow the NMDOJ to resume what federal intervention interrupted.”
USDOJ has publicly maintained it’s willing to help. A department spokesperson said in July that the agency welcomed New Mexico’s investigation and stood ready to assist, and a DNM official made a similar public pledge in June. But the complaint says DOJ’s Southern District of New York office told the state directly in mid-July it would not turn over unredacted records, citing victim privacy and protective orders from the Epstein and Maxwell criminal cases — objections New Mexico’s suit argues misread those orders and don’t hold up under DOJ’s own disclosure rules.
New Mexico’s complaint asks the court to declare DOJ’s refusal unlawful, order the unredacted materials produced, or at minimum force the agency to properly reconsider the request under its own regulations. The state argues it’s one of the only jurisdictions still positioned to pursue charges tied to Epstein’s New Mexico conduct, since federal law doesn’t cover several of the state crimes under investigation, including criminal sexual penetration and criminal sexual contact.