New Mexico’s former Attorney General is calling out the Justice Department for systematically undermining the state’s long-running effort to probe Jeffrey Epstein’s isolated Zorro Ranch, revealing a pattern of interference that began in 2019 and continues to this day.
Hector Balderas says federal prosecutors struck an informal deal, took the state’s evidence, then ghosted New Mexico while the elite predator’s desert compound remained largely untouched.
In an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation, Balderas detailed how the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York persuaded his office to halt interviews of witnesses and persons of interest in exchange for a promise to return any state-related materials once the federal case wrapped. That promise, he says, was never kept.
A newly surfaced handwritten note from July 23, 2019, captures the arrangement: “Agreed NMDOJ will stop interviews + refer all matters to SDNY. SDNY will refer any state-related matters to NMAG @ [the] conclusion of SDNY case.”
An email from then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey days later confirmed the conversation, stating New Mexico had agreed to “cease any investigation into sex trafficking and share whatever they had gathered to date” while the federal side pledged to pass along state crime information later.
Hellbound and Down 