This article was first published Sept. 21, 2026, on Medium and in The Existentialist Republic.
Updated October 1, 2026.
Three New Mexico felonies, one public sequence: Maxwell interview, camp transfer, missing transfer file, Zorro Ranch withhold.
Under New Mexico criminal law, the charging question is not whether a federal cabinet officer can be “got.” It is whether the public record supplies probable cause on named elements. Section 30-24-3 (bribery of witnesses), § 30-22-5 (tampering with evidence), and § 30-28-2 (conspiracy) are short statutes. Each turns on conduct already described in congressional letters, Bureau of Prisons placement rules, and Attorney General Torrez’s August complaint naming Blanche as a defendant.
The charging question under New Mexico law is elements, not outrage: treat the House Judiciary Democrats’ transfer letter and the missing authorization records as predicate facts for § 30-22-5, then ask whether the camp placement (described as categorically off-limits to sex offenders under bureau policy) qualifies as “anything of value” under § 30-24-3 when Maxwell was already a likely witness in New Mexico’s reopened Zorro Ranch matter.
Gamble v. United States and Trump v. Vance do not invent state jurisdiction; they remind counsel that a federal non-prosecution decision and even presidential process limits do not erase a state’s power to investigate its own code. Interviewing a witness may be a federal duty, but conferring a custody benefit timed to testimony is the fact pattern a federal judge would have to accept as “necessary and proper” under In re Neagle if Supremacy Clause immunity is raised.
Torrez’s civil suit for documents and a criminal investigation are related but not the same remedy. The civil complaint is evidence of notice and obstruction theory under the tampering statute once the state investigation was live (February reopen); the charging decision is a separate prosecutorial act under a lower standard than proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Some specifics on the apparent unlawful conduct. In July 2025, Blanche spent nine hours over two days personally interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell, the central living witness to the trafficking of children at Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch near Santa Fe. About a week later, the Bureau of Prisons moved her from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security camp in Bryan, Texas. It was the least restrictive custody the federal system has, and her sex-offense conviction had made it off limits to her. Senator Cory Booker called the transfer a move that “seems clearly like a reward,” and House Judiciary Democrats, led by Jamie Raskin, opened an investigation into it, warning that the administration “may now be attempting to tamper with a crucial witness.”
Blanche is now sitting on the evidence that could charge the men who used that ranch. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez reopened the state’s criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch on February 19, 2026, and it is the only active criminal investigation in the country related to Epstein. His office asked Blanche’s Justice Department for the case file ten times and got back about 31 pages, mostly news clippings and the office’s own past letters, from files in which Zorro Ranch appears roughly 13,000 times. Torrez has said Blanche could grant access “with a stroke of a pen” and that the department chose “to stonewall, to obstruct and to, frankly, conceal.” On August 5, 2026, he sued Blanche and the department for the file. New Mexico had closed this same investigation once before.
An important question for any attorneys or judges reading this to ask or answer, if you are open to it: at what point is an office holder’s abuse of power so blatantly partisan and criminally motivated that it loses the traditional deference toward authorities under the authority of that same individual’s organization?
In 2019, federal prosecutors asked the state to stand down and promised to share what they found; the state handed over its files, and the promised information never came. Torrez reopened the case in February, and from that day the department’s continued withholding of the file is itself conduct a New Mexico grand jury can charge as tampering.
New Mexico law clearly outlines the details. Giving a thing of value to a person likely to become a witness is bribery of a witness under Section 30–24–3, a third-degree felony, and Maxwell got her transfer a week after her nine hours with Blanche.
Hiding physical evidence to keep a crime from being prosecuted is tampering with evidence under Section 30–22–5, and that is the file Blanche is holding.
Combining with others to do either is conspiracy under Section 30–28–2. The bribery statute reaches the offer as much as the delivery, so no spoken agreement has to be proven. The pattern of conduct is sufficient to investigate and potentially even convict.
Together the counts carry at least seven and a half years in state prison.
Nobody says a deal like this aloud, least of all around recording devices. The mob works the same way, and conspiracy law was built for exactly this pattern, because organized crime rarely leaves a signed agreement behind. What it leaves is conduct: who delivered what, in what order, and for whose benefit. Maxwell gave testimony clearing the president, and within days the Bureau of Prisons delivered her a transfer against its own rules. The statute reaches knowingly combining with another, and a combination is proven by conduct.
New Mexicans don’t need a prosecutor to act on that conduct. Article 2, Section 14 of the New Mexico Constitution lets citizens convene a criminal grand jury by petition, in any, or even every, county of the state. The petition needs the greater of 200 registered voters or two percent of a county’s registered voters, and it’s filed with the district court. The judge asks only two questions: whether the petition has enough valid signatures, and whether the conduct it describes, if true, is a crime under New Mexico law. If the answer to both is yes, the judge is required to convene a grand jury, and no district attorney or attorney general has any part in it. That grand jury can subpoena the case file and the witnesses, take their testimony under oath, hear the evidence, and indict Blanche on the vote of eight of its twelve members.
If Blanche were pulled over drunk in Santa Fe, New Mexico would charge him, and his title wouldn’t come into it. Federal office shields an official only for acts inside his lawful federal duties. The rule comes from In re Neagle, decided in 1890, and it has two parts: federal law must have authorized the act, and the officer must have done no more than was necessary and proper to carry it out. No federal law authorizes bribing a witness, and hiding evidence from a state prosecution is necessary and proper to no federal duty.
A deputy attorney general doesn’t interview witnesses; that work goes to line prosecutors, and none were in the room for this one. Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor who led the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Jersey, said he had never seen a deputy attorney general do it, ever. Blanche did it himself, for the one witness who can implicate the man who was until recently his own client. By all appearances he was acting in a personal capacity, in the president’s interest rather than in the duties of his office, and that is the line that decides immunity. If a New Mexico grand jury indicts him, he can remove the case to federal court as a federal officer and argue immunity there.
A federal judge would then decide whether a prison transfer for a convicted trafficker, a week after he questioned her for nine hours, against Bureau of Prisons policy, which bars sex offenders from camps and requires a review the transfer skipped, was necessary and proper to any duty of his office.
The interview happened in Florida and the transfer ended in Texas, so the obvious objection is that none of it happened in New Mexico. That objection gets the test wrong. A state’s criminal law asks whether its statute was violated, and a statute is violated where its result occurs, wherever the actor stood. Fire a rifle across a state line, and the state where the victim falls prosecutes the shooter. New Mexico’s bribery statute reaches giving a thing of value to a person likely to become a witness, and it applies before that person ever testifies. Maxwell is the central witness to a New Mexico case, the transfer was a thing of value to that witness, and the withheld file is evidence in that investigation. Wherever Blanche stood, the harm was to a New Mexico prosecution, and that is a violation of New Mexico law.
The two efforts are separate. Torrez is investigating the crimes at Zorro Ranch and fighting in federal court for the file, and the Legislature’s Epstein Truth Commission has released a report. A citizen grand jury would investigate something else: Blanche’s conduct, the bribery and the withholding, which no prosecutor in the state is examining. Zorro Ranch sits in Santa Fe County, so Santa Fe is the anchor. But every New Mexican is injured when the state’s investigation is blocked, and that makes every other county a proper place to file. It’s why the title says dozens of counties at once. The same petition can be filed in all 33 counties, and each judge answers the two questions independently. A petition with the signatures and the crimes alleged leaves a judge two choices, to convene the grand jury as the constitution commands or to refuse. We will publish every refusal and put it in front of the New Mexico and national press. The people of New Mexico deserve to know if their judges believe in law and order, and if they follow their own rules in service of the public interest.
The fact is, thirty-two counties can refuse despite the law saying they must. All it takes is for one of those judges to authorize and convene the grand jury, beginning an active criminal investigation into the U.S. Attorney General.
Just to be clear, the official named in a petition can be notified and can ask to intervene, so the petition has to allege the specific crimes and the specific intent, with the record attached to substantiate the alleged conduct’s occurrence.
The Supreme Court held in NAACP v. Button (1963) that organizing people to bring legal actions is protected speech, after Virginia tried to prosecute the NAACP for recruiting the plaintiffs in its desegregation cases. New Mexico law does not require a petitioner to hire an attorney, and people have long pursued these petitions without one. Nothing in this article is legal advice.
Related: Todd Blanche Grand Jury Petition, Santa Fe County, New Mexico (The ER)