Todd Blanche

New Mexico filed this 40-page civil complaint on 5 August 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, docketed 1:26-cv-02762, against the U.S. Department of Justice and Todd Blanche in his official capacity as Acting Attorney General. Brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, it pleads two Administrative Procedure Act counts and asks the court to set aside DOJ's refusal of a Touhy request under 28 C.F.R. sections 16.21 to 16.29 for unredacted federal investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein and his associates, sought for the state's reopened criminal investigation into conduct at Zorro Ranch in Santa Fe County. The central allegation is a broken bargain. New Mexico says USDOJ asked it to stand down its own 2019 trafficking investigation and promised in exchange to pass back evidence of state crimes, that the state handed over its entire investigative file that September, and that nothing came back. The narrative traces a 23 July 2019 telephone call, a 13 February 2026 letter to then-Deputy Attorney General Blanche, a 13 March 2026 letter to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi naming five Epstein Files records by Bates number, the certified Touhy request of 3 May 2026 identifying nine more, the District of New Mexico's 30 June reply enclosing 31 pages, and SDNY's refusal by telephone on 14 July 2026. The state says it repeatedly offered to review the material in person at Main Justice under DOJ's own security conditions. Count I pleads arbitrary and capricious final agency action under 5 U.S.C. 706(2)(A); Count II pleads, alternatively, action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed under 706(1). Twenty-five exhibits are cited, including DOJ letters to Congress and the Epstein and Maxwell protective orders.

On June 30, 2026, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez wrote to Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate Deputy Attorney General Diego Pestana seeking unredacted Epstein records held by the U.S. Department of Justice. The four-page letter, copied to New Mexico DOJ Special Counsel Sean Sullivan, is captioned an urgent law enforcement request. Torrez writes that heavily redacted open-source records already establish that multiple survivors were brought to Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch in Santa Fe County on numerous occasions, and that under the redactions sit "the names of survivors, witnesses, co-conspirators, and other individuals" the state needs. The letter chronicles six approaches to DOJ since February 13, 2026, ending with a May 3 Touhy letter to First Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Ellison and FBI Albuquerque Special Agent in Charge Justin Garris and unanswered June 4-5 meeting requests. Despite verbal assurances of cooperation, he writes, no substantive response has been provided and more than 130 days have elapsed. He recounts that New Mexico's 2019 Zorro Ranch investigation was halted at the express request of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, and that on September 17, 2019 then-Chief Deputy Attorney General Clara Moran gave the state's entire file to AUSA Maurene Comey; the notification of further New Mexico survivors she requested, he writes, never came. Three later approaches, he says, met "acknowledgment and nothing more." Torrez argues the delay causes real and escalating harm as witnesses relocate, memories fade and evidence degrades, raising statute-of-limitations, due-process and pre-indictment-delay concerns, while DOJ's burden is not significant because it could grant database access. He sets a July 31, 2026 deadline, after which the request will be considered denied.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's 111-page transcribed interview of former Attorney General Pamela J. Bondi, taken in Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building on Friday, May 29, 2026, from 9:05 a.m. to 12:50 p.m. Chairman James Comer requested it as part of the Committee's investigation into the Epstein and Maxwell cases, the operation of sex-trafficking rings, and related ethics questions. Bondi had been subpoenaed; asked whether she had counsel in a personal capacity, she answered "Only as my -- when I was Attorney General for the United States, and that's Harmeet Dhillon." Dhillon identified herself as appearing on behalf of the Department of Justice, said Bondi was appearing voluntarily in her official capacity only, and objected repeatedly that anything outside Bondi's own tenure was beyond scope. Minority counsel disputed both the limitation and Dhillon's standing to assert it. Bondi testified that then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, by then Acting Attorney General, supervised the files release day to day, and referred questions to Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton and the Bureau of Prisons. After the majority's rounds she returned to the record to say that Rep. Robert Garcia's characterisation of that testimony as blaming Blanche was "100 percent incorrect" and that "I'm not blaming anything on Todd." She declined every question touching conversations with President Trump, including whether any occurred. She answered at length on redaction failures and on Ghislaine Maxwell's transfer; she would not say either way whether any named individual was under investigation. Eleven exhibits were entered, one an email headed "Epstein victim list" that counsel agreed on the record would be sealed.

January 31, 2026 The Honorable Todd Blanche Deputy Attorney General U.S. Department of Justice 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530 Dear Deputy Attorney General Blanche: I am writing to request that the Department of Justice (DOJ) immediately arrange for Members and staff of the House Committee on the Judiciary to review the complete unredacted Epstein files next week. Yesterday, the Department released a tranche of documents related to disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and claims to have fully satisfied its obligations under the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA).1 In your news conference announcing the materials’ release, you said: “If any Member of Congress wishes to review any portions of the response of production in any unredacted form, they’re welcome to make arrangements with the Department to do so, and we’re happy to do that.”2 The Democratic Members of the House Judiciary Committee do wish to review the files. Our review is particularly urgent because DOJ itself claims to have identified over 6 million potentially responsive pages, but after releasing only about half of them-including over 200,000 pages that DOJ redacted or withheld-says strangely that it has fully complied with the Act. We seek to ensure that your redactions comply with the Act’s requirement that materials be withheld only in narrow circumstances, such as protecting victims’ personally identifiable information, and not on the basis of “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”3 Moreover, in light of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appearance in a hearing before the Committee on February 11, it is vital that Committee Members and staff have an opportunity to review the unredacted files in 1 Letter from Pamela J. Bondi, Att’y Gen., & Todd Blanche, Deputy Att’y Gen., U.S. Dep’t of Justice, to Congress (Jan. 30, 2026), https://www.justice.gov/letter-to-

Donald Trump is mentioned over 1,000 times across the 3.5 million pages released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Content includes news clippings, witness interview notes, FBI file entries, and unverified allegations. FBI interview notes reference one victim stating Maxwell once 'presented her' to Trump at a party. An email chain shows Epstein contacting a former Trump resort executive about 'the girl in the new papers.' The DOJ stated that unverified allegations against Trump in the files were considered not credible. Deputy AG Todd Blanche stated 'We did not protect President Trump' in the releases.

PROFFER AGREEMENT With respect to the meeting of Ghislaine Maxwell ("Client") and his attorney, David Oscar Markus, Esq., with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to be held at the Office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Florida on July 24 and 25, 2025 ("the meeting"), the...