New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez announced Wednesday his office is suing the U.S. Department of Justice for what he called “stonewalling” a “routine request.” Torrez is seeking access to unredacted files already promised to his office that he says are “essential” to the state’s reopened investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's activities in New Mexico.
On a conference call announcing the lawsuit, Torrez said he has “been forced” to resort to the lawsuit after requesting access to the files 10 times since February.
“Instead, they have decided to stonewall, to obstruct, and to frankly conceal for whatever reason — and I don't know why — the the kind of access that we have asked for in this case,” he said, “which up until this point and before this this particular case used to be a routine process for law enforcement cooperation, and so these are legal excuses and procedural excuses that the department is trying to hide behind to obscure the fact that nothing in the law prevents Todd Blanche from from granting us this access before the day is over.”
The USDOJ told KUNM in an email that, quote, “the Epstein Files Transparency Act does not require, and the protective orders in place in the Southern District of New York do not permit, disclosure of victim-identifying information carte blanche, and New Mexico has provided no lawful basis to justify such sweeping disclosures.”
The USDOJ response went on to say protecting victim’s identities remains its highest priority, despite the fact that it inadvertently exposed victims’ information by failing to properly redact it prior to releasing part of the Epstein files.
Torrez said the files have already been promised to New Mexico for almost a decade.
In 2019, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which was headed at the time by the current Director Designate of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, asked New Mexico to drop an investigation into Epstein and instead share documents, witness statements and other materials with Clayton’s office for their own Epstein investigation. Epstein was arrested in Manhattan in July of 2019 and charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors. He died in jail by hanging.
Torrez said SDNY never shared any information with New Mexico in return. He said the USDOJ did send over a total of 31 pages that proved to be less than helpful.
“That included virtually nothing of relevance or importance to the investigation, and this, despite the fact that Zorro Ranch is referenced nearly over 13,000 times in the Epstein files.” he said. “and the problem is that most of those references contain information that is either redacted in full or in part, and that obscures potential victims, the identities of co-conspirators, corroborating information and witnesses, all of which impedes and slows down the work of our criminal investigators and prosecutors here at the Department of Justice.”
Torrez said the USDOJ will have a chance to respond to the lawsuit before his office can submit additional information before a hearing takes place, but he said they will be continuing the investigation while the lawsuit is still ongoing.
“We are not stopping that work and waiting for the resolution of this case to to do the work that we are committed to doing in this respect,” he said, “but we do believe that if we had access to that information, this investigation would be moving much more quickly through the system, and we would ultimately get to an outcome and a decision which we could which we could give to the survivors as quickly as possible.”
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
