Epstein’s New Mexico Compound: The Investigation Washington Doesn’t Want to Talk About
One state attorney general says he can’t finish a criminal case because the federal government is sitting on the evidence. The federal government says it’s been nothing but helpful. Both statements ca
A Note from Jack
Let me be upfront about something: this article would normally be for paid subscribers only.
I’m sending it to everyone on purpose.
The free posts you get from me are honest and they’re mine…but the deep dives like this one, the investigations that take days of reading court records…cross-checking sources…and chasing the thread everyone else drops…are usually reserved for paid members.
That’s the work your subscriptions make possible. It’s what lets me follow a story like this however long it takes…without a corporate desk deciding it isn’t worth the trouble.
So consider this one an open door. This is the depth. This is the reporting that names who sold Epstein the ranch and who was supposed to be watching…the part most outlets won’t touch. This is what lands in paid subscribers’ inboxes on a regular basis.
If that’s the kind of work you want more of…upgrading is what keeps it coming…and it puts you inside the full archive…the bonus sections…and the comment threads where… honestly, I learn as much from you as you do from me.
And you have my word on the thing that matters most: when you get a reply from me…it’s from me. No bots…no staff…no stand-ins.
To my paid members: thank you. You paid for this one…and you chose to let me share it with everyone. That generosity is the whole spirit of this place.
To everyone else: this is what you’ve been missing. The door’s open.
#HoldFast
-Jack
Epstein’s New Mexico Compound: The Investigation Washington Doesn’t Want to Talk About
One state attorney general says he can’t finish a criminal case because the federal government is sitting on the evidence. The federal government says it’s been nothing but helpful. Both statements can’t be true. That’s the story.
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #966: Sunday, July 12th, 2026
Let me tell you what nobody’s putting on the front page.
Right now, in the year 2026…there is exactly one active criminal investigation into what happened to actual human beings at Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico compound.
Not a documentary. Not a podcast. Not a congressional hearing where everybody makes a speech and goes home. A real criminal investigation…run by a state Attorney General…with subpoena power and prosecutors…and a clock running on the statute of limitations.
And that investigation is stuck.
Not because there’s no evidence. The opposite. It’s stuck…because the people who have the evidence…the United States Department of Justice…have been sitting on it for more than four months…while the one prosecutor trying to build a case sends letter after letter into a void.
Here’s the part that should make you sit up. When you strip away the noise…you’re left with two official positions from two levels of American government…and they flatly contradict each other. Somebody is not telling you the truth. The only question worth your time is: which one?
What actually happened
Skip the spin. Here are the load-bearing facts, and every one of them is on the record.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sent a letter dated June 30 to Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate Deputy Attorney General Diego Pestana.
His office made it public on July 9. In it…he says his investigators have been trying to get unredacted Epstein records out of the DOJ since a formal request on February 13. He counts six separate attempts to get the federal government to respond… including trying to set up a face-to-face meeting during a trip to Washington.
The number he keeps hammering: more than 130 days.
His office calls that delay unreasonable “under any rule of reason.” He warns that every day the records stay locked up…his ability to bring a case erodes…witnesses move…memories fade…physical evidence degrades. And…he’s threatened to go get a state court subpoena…if the department keeps stonewalling.
Now here’s the DOJ’s version. A department spokesperson says they “substantively responded” to New Mexico’s requests the previous month. They say they welcome New Mexico’s investigation. They say they stand ready to provide “necessary assistance.” And…they say…if the state turns up any federal crimes…they’ll happily prosecute.
Read those two accounts back to back.
One side says: you’ve given me nothing for 130 days and my case is dying. The other side says: we responded, we’re thrilled you’re investigating, call us anytime.
Both of those cannot describe the same reality. Either New Mexico got a substantive response and is being dramatic about it…or…the DOJ’s “substantive response” was the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug…and it’s hiding behind friendly-sounding words while handing over nothing that matters.
That gap…right there…is the whole ballgame. And the public is entitled to know which it is.
What, specifically, is in the drawer
Vague fights are easy to ignore. This one isn’t vague.
Torrez told the DOJ exactly what he needs, and it’s not “the Epstein files” in some hand-wavy sense.
According to his office’s own account…the heavily redacted documents already released publicly…are enough to establish that multiple victims were brought to the New Mexico ranch and abused there…repeatedly…over a span of years.
What’s under the black bars is what he can’t work without: the names of survivors… the names of witnesses…the names of co-conspirators…and the identities of other people who could tell investigators who did what.
Think about what that means in plain English.
The redactions aren’t protecting some abstract national secret. In a criminal investigation into child sex trafficking…the blacked-out lines are the difference between a case and a press release.
You cannot interview a survivor whose name is a rectangle of ink. You cannot subpoena a witness you can’t identify. You cannot charge a co-conspirator the government won’t let you see.
The DOJ has held these materials for years. It knows precisely what’s underneath the redactions. New Mexico is asking for the one thing that would let a prosecutor actually move…and that’s the thing that hasn’t come.
The property everybody forgot on purpose
Quick…name the Epstein locations. You said Manhattan. You said Palm Beach. You said the private island. Everybody knows those.
Almost nobody talks about the ranch. And that’s not an accident of geography. That’s a tell.
Epstein bought the roughly 7,600-acre spread near Stanley, New Mexico…the place he called Zorro Ranch…back in 1993…from the family of a former governor.
He put up a mansion of nearly 27,000 square feet…one of the largest private homes in the state…big enough that he reportedly told Vanity Fair it made his Manhattan townhouse look like a shack.
He added a private airstrip…an aircraft hangar…a helipad. A firehouse. A seven-bay garage. This was not a vacation cabin. This was infrastructure.
And…survivors have said…publicly and for years…that the ranch was one of the places they were assaulted…among them Chauntae Davies and the late Virginia Giuffre, two of the most credible and consequential voices in the entire Epstein saga.
So ask yourself the obvious question.
Every other Epstein property got raided…photographed…catalogued…and splashed across every network in America. Why did the biggest…most isolated…most purpose-built of them all…a compound with its own runway…thirty miles from anywhere…get comparatively little scrutiny?
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s just a question the record refuses to answer…and the fact that it refuses is itself the point.
They already told New Mexico to stand down once
Here’s the fact that turns this from a paperwork dispute into something with a spine.
This isn’t the first time New Mexico tried to investigate the ranch. Back in 2019, the state was already on it. The Attorney General’s office confirmed it was investigating …and had interviewed possible victims who’d been to the property.
Then it stopped.
And according to Torrez…it stopped because the federal government asked it to. His predecessor…then-Attorney General Hector Balderas…has said his office was asked to suspend its work so federal prosecutors could run their own case. New Mexico handed its file up to the feds and stepped back.
Sit with the sequence:
2019: The feds tell New Mexico: stand down, we’ve got this. New Mexico stands down.
Then: Epstein dies in a federal jail cell in August 2019…the federal case against him evaporates…and the New Mexico victims are left…in the state’s own words…without any accounting of what happened to them on New Mexico soil.
Now: New Mexico says: fine, we’ll finish what you interrupted. Give us back the file. And the answer is 130 days of silence.
As Torrez frames it…the DOJ is now holding the very records that would let his office resume exactly the investigation federal intervention shut down in the first place.
The government told a state to stop…took the evidence…dropped the ball when its own defendant died…and is now declining to hand the evidence back.
If that doesn’t bother you, check your pulse.
The clock nobody’s watching
Let me hit the part that turns delay into a weapon.
In a criminal case, time is not neutral. Time is on the side of whoever doesn’t want a prosecution.
Torrez said as much in blunt terms: witnesses relocate and become unreachable… traumatized memories fade further…and physical and documentary evidence degrades… gets lost…or becomes harder to authenticate with every passing month.
Now layer in what happened to the crime scene itself.
The ranch sat largely unused after 2019. Then, in 2023, Epstein’s estate sold it. It had been listed at $27.5 million…dropped to $18 million…and went for an undisclosed price to an entity called San Rafael Ranch LLC; a company registered just weeks before the sale…with the human beings behind it kept off the paperwork.
It was later tied to the family of a Texas real-estate businessman and former state senator…and renamed. The stated plan? A Christian retreat.
So walk the chain of custody with me, because this is what a real investigator has to reconstruct:
Epstein owned it from 1993 until his death in 2019.
The estate controlled it and let it sit, then marketed it for two years.
It changed hands in 2023 to an anonymous LLC.
New Mexico authorities didn’t get to search it as part of this criminal probe until March of 2026.
That’s the better part of seven years between the crimes being alleged…and the state getting to walk the grounds with a warrant…years during which the property was empty…sold…renamed…and under multiple owners.
Every one of those transitions is an opportunity.
I’m not telling you evidence was destroyed. I’m telling you that when you let a crime scene sit unexamined for seven years…while it passes through that many hands…you don’t get to act surprised if the trail’s gone cold.
And…the entity best positioned to have preserved the paper trail from the beginning…the DOJ…is the entity now running out the clock.
The two questions that hang in the air
A good investigation doesn’t just make accusations.
It anticipates the reader’s skepticism…and meets it head-on. So here are the two questions any fair-minded person asks…and neither side gets to dodge them.
If the DOJ genuinely welcomes this investigation…why won’t it just hand over the unredacted records?
You don’t get to say “we support the probe” and “we’re keeping the evidence blacked out” in the same breath…and expect nobody to notice.
Support that withholds the one thing the investigation needs…isn’t support. It’s theater. If there’s a real legal reason for the redactions…grand jury secrecy…an ongoing matter… victim privacy…then say so…specifically…on the record.
So far, that specific justification hasn’t been offered publicly. The silence is the story.
If the DOJ already “substantively responded” in June…why does New Mexico still say it has nothing it can use?
Both things are being asserted by officials…in writing. Either the June response was substantive…and Torrez is grandstanding…or…the June response was a polite non-answer…and the DOJ is using the word “substantive” to launder a stonewall.
Those are the only two options. The public deserves to see the actual response…and judge for itself. Right now, only one side has shown its cards…Torrez put his letter on the internet. The DOJ has offered a statement to reporters. That asymmetry tells you something too.
Why this is bigger than the name you’re expecting
Here’s where I lose some people…and that’s fine.
Some want me to make this about Trump. It’s an easy layup…the acting Attorney General being asked for these files…Todd Blanche…is a former defense lawyer for the President…and the administration has openly said the country should move on from Epstein.
Write that headline…collect the clicks…go home. Half the country nods, the other half rolls its eyes…and nothing changes.
That’s the trap. And it’s beneath the actual story.
Because strip the partisanship out…and look at the machine:
A state’s chief law enforcement officer says the federal government is preventing him from investigating crimes against children…and the federal government’s defense is a press statement.
That’s not a red problem or a blue problem. That’s a who-actually-runs-this-country problem.
Play it forward. If the DOJ can quietly starve a state criminal investigation of evidence …not by refusing outright…which would be a scandal…but…by “responding” slowly… redacting heavily…and issuing warm statements about cooperation while the calendar bleeds…then federalism is a suggestion…and accountability is whatever Washington decides to allow this week.
That mechanism doesn’t care who’s in office. Whoever holds the DOJ holds the drawer. Today it’s these files. Tomorrow it’s whatever’s inconvenient to whoever’s in charge.
You should want this resolved not because of who’s implicated…but because the alternative is a country where a governor’s prosecutor can be politely…patiently… deniably shut down from Washington…and the only people who pay are the survivors who were promised an accounting and got a redaction instead.
The bottom line
I’m not going to tell you who’s guilty.
I don’t know…and neither does anyone writing about this honestly. That’s not the point of this piece.
The point is narrower and harder to wriggle out of.
When a criminal investigation says it cannot move forward because the federal government is withholding the evidence…the public is owed three things…in writing, on the record: exactly what is being withheld…exactly why it’s being withheld…and whether that reason survives thirty seconds of scrutiny.
Right now we have the “what”…survivor names, witness names, co-conspirator identities. We do not have a specific, defensible “why.” And “we support the investigation, now please stop asking about the files” does not survive thirty seconds of anything.
More than 130 days and counting.
A crime scene sold twice and renamed. Survivors who were told to wait in 2019…and are still waiting. And…one prosecutor sending letters into the silence.
Somebody in Washington is hoping you’ll lose interest before the clock runs out.
Don’t.
BONUS: Who Sold Epstein the Ranch–and Who Was Supposed to Be Watching
I saved this one for the bottom…because it takes the central question of this whole piece…why did the ranch go unexamined for so long?…and puts a name on it.
Follow the deed.
Jeffrey Epstein didn’t buy Zorro Ranch from a stranger. He bought it in 1993, reportedly for around $12 million…from the family of Bruce King…the longest-serving governor in New Mexico history…a three-term Democrat…a genuine political institution in that state.
Now here’s where it stops being a real estate footnote…and starts being a story.
Bruce King’s son is Gary King. And from 2007 to 2015…eight straight years while Epstein owned that ranch and lived on it as a convicted sex offender…Gary King was the Attorney General of New Mexico.
The state’s top law enforcement officer. The very office now fighting the DOJ to reopen this case was…back then…run by the son of the man who sold Epstein the property.
And the ties didn’t stop at the deed.
According to reporting by the Santa Fe New Mexican…King’s campaigns took money connected to Epstein.
In 2006, after Epstein’s first arrest…King returned $15,000 from an Epstein entity called the Zorro Trust. Good instinct.
But it didn’t hold: in 2014…running for governor…King accepted tens of thousands of dollars more routed through a cluster of companies tied to Epstein’s address…and reporting indicates Epstein’s lawyers deliberately structured those donations through shell companies to keep them out of the press…precisely because King was campaigning on a promise to prosecute crimes against children.
The files also show King met with Epstein in Santa Fe in 2010 and reportedly flew on a plane Epstein had helped charter.
Then the question that should stop you cold:
Epstein, a man who pled guilty in 2008 and was a registered sex offender…apparently was never required to register as a sex offender in New Mexico while living on that ranch.
The AG’s office doesn’t run the registry…but the Attorney General is still the state’s chief law enforcement officer. So how does a convicted sex offender live for years on a compound thirty miles from the capital…and the machinery of accountability just… doesn’t turn?
Let me be scrupulously fair here, because fairness is the whole point of this newsletter.
Gary King and the King family have not been implicated in any crime connected to Epstein.
A campaign donation is not a conspiracy. A last name on an old warranty deed is not evidence of anything. King has said publicly he barely knew Epstein personally…and he’s signaled he’ll tell state legislators about his dealings with the man if they ask. There may be a perfectly ordinary explanation for every single thread.
But that’s exactly why the files matter. You cannot answer these questions with assumptions. You answer them with records…unredacted names…dates…and documents. The same records the DOJ has been sitting on for 130-plus days.
Which brings us right back to where we started. The reason to pry those files loose isn’t to convict anyone in a newsletter. It’s that they may be the only thing on earth that can finally tell New Mexico…and the survivors…who knew what…and when.
Somebody would rather you never found out.
Still want to look away?
#HoldFast
Before I go...I ask one favor:
If this article helped you understand ongoing events more clearly…
Recommend Jack Hopkins Now.
Restack articles.
Comment thoughtfully.
Share articles from inside Substack.
Back soon.
-Jack
Jack Hopkins
P.S. I know this one's heavy…and I know a lot of you come here to set the weight down, not pick more up.
But…this is exactly the kind of story that survives…only if enough of us refuse to look away.
Washington is counting on the news cycle to do what it always does…move on. So here's my ask: don't let it. Share this with one person who'd otherwise never hear about the ranch. Drop what you know in the comments…because I learn as much from you down there as you do from me.
And check back…I'll follow this thread wherever it goes…however long it takes. That's the promise. We hold the line together…or not at all.
A note on method: The buried-bodies allegation referenced in the reopened investigation originates from an unverified 2019 tip and remains unproven. Direct quotations in this piece are limited to the officials’ own public statements.
Sources
Primary / official documents
New Mexico Department of Justice — “Attorney General Raúl Torrez: USDOJ Is Hindering Our Criminal Investigation by Withholding Unredacted Epstein Files” — NMDOJ press release (July 9, 2026), which also links to AG Torrez’s full June 30 letter to Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.
The current standoff (July 2026)
Al Jazeera — “New Mexico accuses US Justice Department of impeding Epstein investigation”
MS NOW — “New Mexico AG says DOJ is impeding Epstein ranch investigation”
Background: the ranch, its history and sale
True, many layers to the coverup. What we do know, is under this regime, the Feds have been consistently lying and covering up. We cannot give them any presumption of credibility.
Is there (was there) any evidence of graves, buried physical evidence, or eye witnesses to crimes? If so, time has destroyed most of it. We’re years away from definitive answers.