New Mexico filed the Jeffrey Epstein New Mexico lawsuit on Wednesday against the US Department of Justice and Todd Blanche, saying the federal response left its criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro ranch without the unredacted records Raúl Torrez wanted. The filing in the US district court for the district of Columbia follows a 31 July deadline that passed without the information he sought.
Torrez said he had made “repeated, documented, good-faith efforts to obtain the unredacted investigative records in the DoJ’s custody” before turning to court. He had also told Blanche on 14 July that he would “pursue all available legal remedies without further notice” if the records were not shared by the deadline.
Torrez and New Mexico
The lawsuit asks for a declaration that Blanche and the Justice Department acted illegally in refusing to turn over evidence tied to events at Zorro ranch. It also asks the court to require compliance with the Epstein transparency law and Touhy regulations, the two legal routes Torrez says govern disclosure in this case.
Torrez reopened the state investigation in February after the Zorro property was mentioned thousands of times in recent releases of the Epstein files. He said the aim was to establish what had taken place at the 10,000-acre ranch about 30 miles south of Santa Fe.
US attorney’s office for the district of New Mexico
The US attorney’s office for the district of New Mexico said it had “substantively responded” on 30 June by emailing 31 documents. Torrez said those papers were mostly old news clippings and heavily redacted pages that gave state investigators little use.
That dispute leaves the court to decide whether the Justice Department must produce material tied to events at Zorro ranch. New Mexico’s filing presses for records the state says remain in federal hands, while the federal office says it already answered with the documents it sent.
Jeffrey Epstein bought the ranch in 1993 from the estate of Bruce King, and survivors had previously given testimony about sexual and physical abuse there by Epstein and others. The state’s complaint puts the question in one place: what evidence, if any, the Justice Department still holds about the ranch and whether it must be handed over now.
