US Rep. Leger Fernández, NM attorney general announce proposal aimed at unreleased Epstein files

At a news conference in Torrez’s downtown Albuquerque office, U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) said she began working on the legislation — titled “Epstein Files Transparency Act II” — with U.S. Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Ro Khanna (D-California) after seeing the federal government refuse to release some 3 million documents related to Epstein and make redactions on other publicly released documents.

If passed, the proposed bill would empower state attorneys general to file a legal challenge against the federal government alleging an unlawful withholding, redaction or removal of Epstein-related documents and investigative materials.

“If transparency is not transparency, then justice is not justice,” Leger Fernández said.

Torrez sued the U.S. Department of Justice earlier in August and accused it of impeding his criminal investigation into Epstein and his New Mexico property, Zorro Ranch, by refusing to release the relevant, unredacted files.

Torrez told reporters Wednesday that the lawsuit was a “novel” approach, as he had never before encountered a federal administration that denied a law enforcement agency’s requests for documents that could be useful for litigation. The proposed legislation, Torrez said, would give agencies like his an easier path to challenge the federal government’s withholding of documents.

“It is a prerequisite for justice that we have all the facts,” he said.

A dispute over the state’s Epstein investigation

While disputes play out regarding the federal government’s handling of Epstein files, infighting similarly broke out among members of the New Mexico House of Representatives subcommittee charged with investigating the late sex offender’s time in the state.

The subcommittee — known informally as a four-member truth commission with two Republicans and two Democrats from the state House — last week published its first report on its investigation. While lawmakers on the commission acknowledged that their report did not break new ground, they said it put what’s known about Epstein’s time in the state in a single document.

Days later, the commission’s Republican members said they were excluded from final decisions in the report’s creation.

In a joint statement Tuesday, Reps. William “Bill” Hall (R-Farmington) and Andrea Reeb (R-Clovis) said they didn’t receive a draft of the commission’s report until 11:30 p.m. the night before they were scheduled to present it to the public at the state Capitol.

They said they subsequently learned that it omitted references to Deb Haaland, the former U.S. Interior secretary and current Democratic nominee for New Mexico governor. Ahead of the June primary election, campaign ads accused Haaland of flying on an Epstein-owned jet in 2014, when she was running on former state Attorney General Gary King’s gubernatorial ticket as a candidate for lieutenant governor. However, publicly available documents show that the plane did not belong to Epstein and that King had requested Epstein’s help in chartering a flight.

Nonetheless, Hall and Reeb said that their fellow commission members had agreed to include reference to Haaland’s flight in the recent report.

“This commission is supposed to be about finding the truth, wherever it leads,” Reeb wrote in a statement. “This is unacceptable. We must be able to assure the public that political considerations are not influencing what is included, or excluded, from this investigation.”

Commission Chair Rep. Andrea Romero (D-Santa Fe) in a statement said she was “shocked to hear of these concerns through the press, as every committee member weighed in on the report and was included in all plans as they were developed.” 

“Our commission came to a collective decision not to name survivors, victims or the countless parties with tangential interactions, unverified claims or fractional reporting and to keep our interim report and ongoing work rightly focused on perpetrators and enablers,” Romero wrote. “All of our members worked with our legal team to compile a draft report with the agreed-upon content, and it was the responsibility of every member to ensure the report reflected what we wanted to convey.”

Romero said commission leaders would “improve our internal processes to ensure all members are on the same page going forward” and will focus on “the important work in front of us, not the headwinds of the day or attempts to politicize or pursuit of justice for victims.”