Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Sign up to attend Michael’s talk in Los Angeles on Thursday, November 20: HERE.
The House Democrats on the Oversight Committee, whose header is a picture of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, released a cache of emails that they claimed indicted Trump. Instead the emails again confirm that Trump had broken ties with Epstein and wanted nothing more to do with him.
The Democrat members of the committee showed no interest in why members of their party in three states, New York, Florida and New Mexico, covered up for Epstein and kept him off the sex offender registry. That’s not something Trump, who didn’t even hold public office until six years later, could have done. If the House Dems on the Oversight Committee really wanted to know, they could have asked one of their own members: Rep. Melanie Stansbury.
At the recent ‘No Kings’ rally, Rep. Stansbury claimed that “America has no kings.” America may have no kings, but New Mexico had two influential ones.
Bruce and Gary King.
Former Gov. Bruce King had been a power player in the state from the 50s through the 90s. During his final years in office, King sold what would become the Zorro Ranch to Jeffrey Epstein for $12 million. The sale was stranger than it sounded because the land around the Zorro Ranch, where Epstein would reportedly hold lavish parties featuring major New Mexico political figures, and bring teenage girls there to abuse, went on belonging to the King family.
The deal with the governor gave Epstein his own compound, airstrip, and grazing rights around it, to keep Zorro as isolated as possible, allowing him to fly in guests and girls with no questions.
Without Gov. King, Epstein would never have been able to perpetrate his abuses in the state.
Unlike New York and Florida, Epstein had no ties to New Mexico and no obvious reason to build a compound there. Santa Fe was much farther from the action than Palm Beach or Manhattan.
But Epstein didn’t just buy land from anyone, he bought it from the man running the state longer than anyone else and a member of the most influential family in the state. Shortly after the governor left office, his son, Gary King, already a state legislator, went to work under Bill Richardson, in the Clinton administration, before becoming New Mexico’s Attorney General.
Jeffrey Epstein provided sizable donations to both Gary King and Bill Richardson. When the first phase of the Epstein scandal broke, Gary King was forced to return $15,000 in donations from the notorious sex predator. “I don’t think I’ve ever met him personally. He knows other members of my family better,” King claimed.
Then in 2014, King had to return another $30,400 in donations from 7 different front companies linked to the notorious sex predator registered at St. Thomas, the address Epstein used as his port for trips to his private island, known anecdotally as ‘Lolita Island’.
The contributions, which surpassed the $10,400 annual legal limit, were not only illegal, but the multiple names and sources suggested that they were intended to bypass those limitations.
Why was Epstein invested in supporting Gary King’s gubernatorial run for his father’s old job to the extent of sending so much money from different companies and addresses? Especially since King had publicly disavowed Epstein? Was Epstein, a serial abuser, an altruist willing to generously aid a ‘public servant’ without wanting anything, even recognition, in return?
But between 2006 and 2014, something strange happened to Jeffrey Epstein in New Mexico.
After being convicted of sex offenses in Florida, Jeffrey Epstein went ahead and registered as a sex offender in New Mexico. But the authorities kindly told him that he didn’t have to register after all and took him off the list.
That was in 2010 while Attorney General Gary King was the state’s top law enforcement officer.
In 2011, a year after Epstein was struck from New Mexico’s sex offender registry, Attorney General Gary King delivered a presentation to the UN about his fight against ‘human trafficking’. Meanwhile, Epstein, one of his donors, was able to operate a sex trafficking operation on the secluded ranch land that he brought from King’s father on which he had built a private airstrip.
And secured state grazing rights allowing him to keep the public from seeing what went on.
New Mexico authorities blamed Epstein’s removal from the sex offender list on a “loophole” because the girl he abused was supposedly at the age of consent in the state. But he had been accused of molesting girls as young as 14 years old and in New Mexico in particular, there was at least one allegation involving a 15-year-old girl.
Virginia Giuffre claimed that she had been recruited at 16 to give ‘massages’ and one of the men Epstein had sent her to give massages to was New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.
The former governor’s spokesperson vocally denied the allegations, claiming that “in Governor Richardson’s limited interactions with Mr. Epstein, he never saw him in the presence of young or underage girls.” And denied ever visiting “Mr. Epstein’s residence in the Virgin Islands”, but not the Zorro Ranch where the visitors reportedly included Bill Richardson and Prince Andrew, and where some of the abuses occurred.
Gov. Bill Richardson was forced to return $50,000 in campaign donations from Jeffrey Epstein.
Other beneficiaries of Epstein’s donations included Attorney General King, Land Commissioner Jim Baca and Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano. Baca, like Richardson, had come out of the Clinton administration. Solano was forced to resign over embezzlement accusations.
Why was Epstein, a career criminal, so interested in donating to local law enforcement officials?
State officials have been promising investigations of Epstein going on nearly a decade. None of those investigations ever involved the state’s power players who were tied to Epstein, who took his money, and who were in a position to draw a veil of silence over his crimes at Zorro.
Recently, New Mexico legislators announced that they want a “truth commission” on a par with the 9/11 commission, to investigate Epstein. There have already been two investigations, including by former state Attorney General Hector Balderas, who succeeded King, all promising to get to the bottom of what Epstein had been up to at Zorro. None of them did anything.
The Balderas investigation, which was coordinated with Maurene Comey, the daughter of FBI boss James Comey, never went anywhere. A release of documents last month, including “police reports, witness statements, and internal state correspondence” were “almost entirely redacted.”
And it doesn’t especially matter because the question of what sex offenses Epstein committed at Zorro or Lolita Island matter much less than which officials worked to cover them up.
That’s a question that no investigation wants to touch.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury, like most members of her party, doesn’t want to discuss Epstein’s ties to the Clinton administration and figures in the Clinton administration who went on to run her state, the powerful political families playing key roles in the state, or her own links to them.
Rather than asking why her state needs yet another commission to investigate Epstein instead of unredacting the “mostly redacted” documents it previously released, Rep. Stansbury is trying to direct the blame for the crimes committed by a Democrat donor and her allies at Trump.
Even as her own state allies redacted the majority of the Epstein files, Rep. Stansbury has been doing cable news hits, social media posts and press conferences demanding that Trump “release the files” and announcing Epstein “files drops” that never amount to anything.
“For far too long, survivors of sexual violence have been silenced by systems built to protect the powerful,” Rep. Stansbury claimed. Stansbury was a protege of Deb Haaland and took her congressional seat. Haaland began her career by running for lieutenant governor alongside Gary King. Haaland is said to be preparing her own gubernatorial race shortly.
The King-Haaland race appears to have been the one backed by Jeffrey Epstein through front groups operating out of Epstein’s office near the port that took him to Lolita Island.
If Stansbury really wants answers, she can follow the money back to her own friends.
New Mexico and the horrors at the Zorro Ranch were a microcosm of what happened in Democratic Party enclaves around the country where powerful families and officials protected and covered up for Jeffrey Epstein because there was money in it for them. The Democrats in the House Oversight Committee want to talk about Trump to cover up their own abuses.
The real answers won’t be found in some magic files, but in hauling state and local officials in New York, Florida and New Mexico before not just committees, but prosecutors, to find out why Epstein got a pass even after he had been convicted and his crimes were a matter of public record. State and local officials in Manhattan, Palm Beach and New Mexico must be made to answer why Epstein’s name was struck from sex offender registries and who was responsible.
And then they can move on to the Clintons whose foundation Jeffrey Epstein co-founded and the networks of Clinton officials who appear to have served as ‘jumping off’ points for his influence.
The truth won’t be found in D.C. It’ll be found where Epstein’s crimes actually took place.
