In New Mexico you do not need a prosecutor to start a grand jury. Get enough of your neighbours to sign a petition, hand it to the county, and the state constitution says a grand jury has to be convened. No district attorney has to agree. No judge has to be persuaded.
Santa Fe County did exactly that about Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch. More than 200 people signed. Eddy Aragon filed it with the sheriff on 7 July 2020.
Nobody convened it.
Aragon held the petition up to his camera on Thursday and said it had never been shown anywhere. The signers asked a grand jury to look at Ghislaine Maxwell and at anyone who knew what was happening on the ranch. He read out the account underneath it: a woman told CBS News that Maxwell recruited her, that Epstein paid for her sister to study abroad, and that she was raped at Zorro Ranch at least twice.
“No one’s covered any of this,” Aragon told Zev.
That petition sat in a sheriff’s office while New Mexico went to Washington instead. Raúl Torrez, the state’s attorney general, sued the Justice Department and Todd Blanche in federal court on 5 August. His investigators have been asking for the unredacted Epstein files for 173 days. They have been told no ten times. The Senate confirmed Blanche as attorney general three days after Torrez filed.
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