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The interim report was due Friday. It did not come.

New Mexico’s Survivor’s Truth Commission — the four-member state House panel created to establish what Jeffrey Epstein did in New Mexico, where he owned Zorro Ranch, and who in this state allowed him to do whatever it was he did here for decades — announced instead that it had “prepared” the report by the July 31 deadline but would withhold it until Wednesday, August 5, at one o’clock, in Room 307 of the Roundhouse. The reason offered was scheduling: that was the earliest date all four members could appear in person.

No one is likely less surprised by this display of ineptitude than I.

Four days late, for a single interim update, from a body that has had since the winter session and two million taxpayer dollars to produce it. Hold onto that number — two million — because the missed deadline, while annoying, is the smallest thing wrong with how this commission has thus far managed its job.

Start with the law firm they hired to spearhead the investigation for them.

Every few weeks, a New Mexico outlet describes the commission’s special counsel as an “Albuquerque-based law firm.” The Santa Fe New Mexican used the phrase again this week, in the very story about the missed deadline. The firm is Fadduol, Cluff, Hardy & Conaway. It is a Texas personal-injury practice that keeps satellite offices in New Mexico. Calling it “Albuquerque-based” is like calling a Lubbock outfit a Santa Fe institution because it rents a room here. The firm won a contract worth up to $750,000 — more than a third of the entire investigative budget — and our press cannot manage to get its home state right, because our press simply regurgitates whatever half-truths the political establishment feeds them in press releases. It is that the press are corrupt? Or are they merely incompetent? I don’t have an answer. Perhaps it is that uniquely New Mexican recipe of both corruption and incompetence, like Christmas enchiladas that are both green and red.

Why does the home state of the law firm hired to “investigate” matter? Because the ranch at the center of this investigation is now owned by a Texas political family. Because the firm’s founders carry their own donation histories that directly benefit members of the commission itself, a blatant ethics violation. And because the word “local” is doing an enormous amount of laundering inside that one hyphenated phrase, turning an out-of-state firm with local political donation entanglements into a neighborly, homegrown choice.

Those entanglements are documented, and I have documented them. Campaign-finance records on file with the New Mexico Secretary of State show that the political action committee of the state’s trial-lawyers association gave thousands of dollars to two of the four commissioners who voted to hire the firm — Chair Andrea Romero and Rep. Marianna Anaya. The firm’s lead investigator once sat on the board of that same PAC. The firm’s founders have a separate history of donations to Bill Richardson, the late governor who is himself named in the Epstein files and who was named as an abuser by Virginia Giuffre in her memoir. A commission assembled to investigate a web of New Mexico money and favor hired, to do the investigating, a firm sitting inside the web. In New Mexico, we call this “business as usual,” which is why our state can be both one of the most staggeringly beautiful geographic places on earth, and also one of the deepest pits of political corruption hell.

There is also the matter of who ran the procurement — which is to say, the process by which requests for proposals go out and contractors (like the legal team) are hired for the commission. An official named Gerardo Paredes, Jr., steered the selection that produced this firm, despite at the very least an appearance of a major a conflict of interest in the outcome. He was recently employed as an accountant in the Texas Comptroller’s Office, the same office now held by appointment by Donald Huffines, the new owner of Epstein’s Zorro Ranch.

And not a single New Mexico news media outlet other than the one you are reading right now has disclosed this to its readers or viewers, or apparently even thought to ask about. The mainstream coverage treats the hires of first Parade and then the Texas law firm as a neutral administrative act. They were nothing of the kind. I wrote about this, too, and was told by commissioner Mariana Anaya that the commission did not think there was a conflict of interest.

Here is the detail that ought to end the pretense that this is an investigation at all. In the months it has operated, the commission has issued subpoenas — to agencies. To departments. To organizations. It has not issued a subpoena to a single human being. You can subpoena the Department of Public Safety and receive a box of the records that department elects to hand over. Subpoena a person, and you can place them under oath, ask them what they knew and when they knew it, and watch them decide in real time whether to lie or take the Fifth. One of those is an investigation. The other is a records request with a press release stapled to the front.

Consider, then, what the commission did about John J. Kelly.

Kelly was the United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico when a teenager’s report of Epstein’s abuse moved through the federal system, and he opened nothing. The same year as that appointment, he had served as Epstein’s personal attorney-in-fact, closing the purchase of Zorro Ranch; his name and signature sit in the federal files. Asked by a local TV reporter why he appeared in Epstein’s black book, he suggested he take it up with Epstein, who was by then years dead. Kelly spent the last chapter of his public life, by the Mayor Tim Keller’s appointment, seated on Albuquerque’s ethics board — the panel that polices everyone else’s ethics — and through months of public reporting on his Epstein ties, he was never removed. The commission never compelled his testimony. Kelly died recently, at 78, out of state in California, after “a brief illness,” and the questions permanently intact. In New Mexico, it turns out, the way you remove a friend of Epstein’s from public life is to wait for the actuarial tables. He was charged with no crime, and now he never will be.

The current attorney general of New Mexico, Raúl Torrez, has built his public posture about Epstein and Zorro around a single, genuine grievance: that the U.S. Department of Justice is withholding the unredacted files New Mexico needs, and he has threatened to sue to pry them loose. He is right that the federal government is stonewalling. That is real obstruction, and worth the fight. But the framing is also incomplete and politically convenient, because it locates the villain safely in Washington and in the republican party alone. Meanwhile the men already named in the files New Mexico does have go untouched — Kelly, Bill Richardson and former Attorney General Gary King, all Democrats like Torrez. King’s own family sold Epstein the ranch. King worked with Epstein’s lawyers to concoct false businesses to donate money to King’s campaigns after Epstein was a convicted sex offender, because King did not want to tarnish his campaign promise to tackle child sex trafficking by letting the public know he was taking money from a child sex trafficker. King, along with current New Mexico gubernatorial candidate and democrat Deb Haaland, also took a private flight tied to Epstein during King’s run for governor and Haaland’s run for lieutenant governor, and, records in the files show, was less than forthcoming about it afterward. King says he would have prosecuted Epstein had he known anything was amiss, but his own emails with Epstein’s lawyers about forming fake companies for donations prove he very well knew things were amiss and covered them up for his own personal gain. Torrez has plenty to act on with Gary King, yet King has not been subpoenaed, nor has he been charged with anything. A full accounting, if it were honest and truly serving the victims and the public, does not get to skip the parts already sitting on the table in Santa Fe that involve powerful New Mexico democrats, while everyone in the room points at D.C.’s republicans as the only ones to blame.

Then there is the fairy tale Hector Balderas keeps telling, that Melanie Stansbury and the local and national media repeat without questioning it. The former attorney general says his office was investigating Epstein until the feds, in 2019, made him stop. He offered another version of it this week, insisting his office played the strongest hand it had. Read the wording carefully — in his own account and in the contemporaneous reporting: the federal prosecutors asked him to stand down. They asked. A request is not an order. A state attorney general holds independent authority; the federal government cannot switch off a state investigation, and Balderas was free to resume his any day he chose. He chose not to. “They made me stop” is a far more comfortable sentence than “I agreed to stop, and when I realized they weren’t cooperating, did nothing,” which is precisely why we keep hearing the first one, which is a lie. All of which indicates, to me anyway, that this whole “truth commission” is nothing but damage control for the New Mexico political players still in power who have everything to lose if the truth of their own cabal’s involvement with Epstein were to come to light.

No better way to obstruct the truth than to be the one “investigating” it.

And then there’s the so-called search of Zorro Ranch, that controlled opposition outlets like Meidas Touch have claimed was a real search — the one moment the public was told the walls were finally coming down. It was more bullshit.

In March, the Department of Justice searched Zorro Ranch with cadaver dogs and drones, and the coverage read like a breakthrough. Look at what it actually was. The property now belongs to Don Huffines, the Russia-adjascent Texas Republican running for state comptroller who was installed as temporary comptroller last month by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose family bought the ranch in 2023. The search happened by consent: the owners signed a document granting access, with the owner retaining complete control over what could or could not be searched. Even ABC News acknowledged it was unclear whether investigators ever obtained a warrant at all. To be clear: They did not. It was not a warrant search. This was a search conducted on the owner’s terms, on paper he signed, with his attorneys involved — the same attorneys who, records show, had already been sparring with the state over identification requirements and pushing for a county nondisclosure agreement. And the press called it cooperation. When the subject of a search sets the terms of the search, “cooperation” is the wrong word. The word is “control.”

This is not complicated. A real investigation subpoenas people, not just filing cabinets. It hires counsel without financial ties to the commissioners doing the hiring. It acts on the names already in its possession instead of waiting on Washington and on funerals. It treats a consent search by a politically connected owner as the limited thing it is, not as a triumph.

What New Mexico has instead is a commission four days late with a report it says it prepared on time but would not release, represented by a Texas firm the papers keep calling local, that has placed no living person under oath, operating in a state where the men who could answer the hardest questions keep aging out of reach. The survivors were promised a full accounting of what happened at Zorro Ranch and of the systemic failures that let it run unchecked for decades. They are owed exactly that. What is taking shape in Room 307 is beginning to look like the newest of those failures — dressed, for the occasion, as the cure.

I offer all my investigations, analysis and news for free, but your support is appreciated and necessary — now more than ever. Please like, share and comment. And subscribe. Paid, if you can spare $6 a month. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Just four $25 tips per day allow me to write full-time. Thank you.

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