Epstein Was Never Properly Investigated in New Mexico Despite Reports to FBI. Follow the Money Far Enough and It Leads to Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, DJT, and a Trillion-Dollar Nuclear Deal.
The Epstein-connected company that paid lawmakers in New Mexico to look the other way employed Ivanka Trump, bailed out Jared Kushner, and is now DJT's partner in a billion-dollar nuclear deal.
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By now you probably know I’m trying to figure out why Jeffrey Epstein was never properly investigated in New Mexico, where his sprawling house of horrors known as Zorro Ranch was not only never searched, but allowed to switch hands to a Trump loyalist.
In this ongoing series of stories, I’ve uncovered that John J. Kelly, then the United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico who should have investigated Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of Annie Farmer at Zorro Ranch, was Epstein’s personal Power of Attorney for the purchase of that ranch. I’ve also discovered that former Lieutenant Governor Diane Denish — whose husband Herbert was a paid lobbyist for an Ohio company whose founding family maintained documented ties to Epstein — has been running a Facebook comment campaign in 2026 to discredit Epstein’s survivors for some weird reason. To. This. Day.
Today I follow the money with the Ohio company, which Diane Denish helping bring to New Mexico to build Mesa del Sol in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories, with the state’s taxpayers footing the half-billion-dollar bill. That trail, shockingly, leads all the way to the first family of the United States, proving yet again that the Epstein class does not care about political party beyond using it to divide the United States public so we’re all too busy fighting each other over social issues to notice they’re siphoning our money to themselves and one another.
The Company
Forest City Enterprises was a Cleveland, Ohio real estate dynasty founded by the Ratner family — Polish Jewish immigrants who built one of the most politically connected real estate empires in American history. By the time Forest City came to New Mexico in 2002, it was a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company with projects across the country.
That year, Forest City’s subsidiary Forest City Covington won a competitive bid from the New Mexico State Land Office to develop Mesa del Sol — a 13,000-acre project on state-owned land south of Albuquerque, adjacent to Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia National Laboratories, one of two major nuclear weapons research facilities in New Mexico.
To understand what happened next, you need to understand who was governing New Mexico at the time — and who had been governing it before. I know it’s a lot. In fact, it’s probably a book. And one of these days, I’ll organize all these articles into just that, a book, to put all the pieces in one place with a clear narrative thread. For now, we’ll all have to make do with this newsletter.
The King Dynasty
Bruce King served three non-consecutive terms as Governor of New Mexico. He was the man who sold Jeffrey Epstein the Zorro Ranch property, while he was the sitting governor of New Mexico in 1993. He was the man who introduced Epstein to John J. Kelly — the attorney who became Epstein’s personal Power of Attorney for that purchase and several months later was appointed the United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico under Bill Clinton’s Dept. of Justice. Bruce King was the man who appointed both Kelly and Diane Denish, who would later become the state’s Lt. Governor, serving with Gov. Bill Richardson, to the New Mexico Tech Board of Regents.
Bruce King’s son is Gary King — who served as New Mexico’s Attorney General from 2007 to 2014, and was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2014.
Gary King’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein dates to at least 1993 — the same year his father sold Epstein Zorro Ranch, the same year Kelly signed the Power of Attorney. According to documents in the federal Epstein files reported by the New Mexico Political Report, Gary King actively courted Epstein for two decades, holding private lunches and coordinating campaign donations hidden behind corporate fronts specifically to avoid press coverage. Gary King received Epstein money in his 2004 congressional race. In his 2014 gubernatorial campaign, he received $35,600 in Epstein donations routed through shell companies designed to keep the press from realizing the money came from a convicted sex offender and pedophile, as King was running on a campaign message of protecting kids from sex trafficking. He flew on Epstein’s private jet. He sent Epstein a personal email thanking him for a proposed $50,000 personal donation. Gary King deserves his own three part series, so that’s in the works. Yay. And also, barf. But yeah.
Gary King was New Mexico’s Attorney General — the state’s chief law enforcement officer — while Epstein survivors were coming forward. No state investigation of Zorro Ranch was ever opened on his watch, nor on Kelly’s watch.
Gary King’s wife, Yolanda Jones King, meanwhile was the Director of Engineering and Technical Management at the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base — the installation that shares a fence line with Sandia National Laboratories, which Robert Maxwell, the father of Epstein’s “friend” and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, had infiltrated with Israeli-backdoored PROMIS software in 1984, almost a decade before his daughter led Epstein to the NM property he would buy.
The family that sold Epstein the ranch produced the state Attorney General who never investigated it, and introduced Epstein to the future US Attorney for the District of New Mexico who ALSO would never investigate it. The NM Attorney General’s wife ran the nuclear weapons program at the base adjacent to the nuclear weapons laboratory that Forest City would later partner with. This, my friends, is a New Mexico dynasty operating as a node in a quasi-criminal transnational intelligence and neoliberal financial operation that has slowly and methodically conquered the United States of America, without the people of the nation noticing, since the Reagan era.
Bill Richardson and Forest City
When Bill Richardson was elected governor of New Mexico in 2002 — the same year Forest City won the Mesa del Sol bid — Forest City Covington NM LLC contributed $30,000 to his campaign. In 2006, they contributed $109,249 more. Combined with contributions from Forest City affiliates and executives, the total flowing from the Ratner family’s New Mexico operation to Richardson’s campaigns reached nearly $300,000 over six years.
Richardson personally signed the Tax Increment Development Act authorizing Forest City Covington to issue up to $500 million — half a billion bucks — in public bonds for Mesa del Sol. His appointees controlled the University of New Mexico board of regents, which engineered a three-way land deal allowing Forest City to purchase 3,000 acres of state university land for $9 million — a price the New York Times later reported was arranged with strong urging from the governor’s office.
Richardson was simultaneously maintaining his documented personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein throughout this entire period — meeting him at least nine times after Epstein’s Florida conviction, visiting his private island, flying on his helicopter alongside at least one alleged victim, and brokering international introductions on Epstein’s behalf. Survivors including Virginia Guiffre reported being sexually abused by Richardson. Epstein described Richardson to a French diplomat as a close friend and noted he was “close to both [Hugo] Chavez and [Fidel] Castro.”
The man receiving nearly $300,000 from the Ratner family’s New Mexico operation was the same man protecting Epstein’s New Mexico operations. He died in 2023 having denied wrongdoing until the end. He also denied ever flying on Epstein’s plane or visiting his island, but the release of the Epstein files proved Richardson’s claims to have been lies.
The Epstein-Ratner Connection
A confidential document in the federal Epstein files — EFTA_R1_02214161, titled “Fund Investment Overview” and dated November 16, 2010, eight months after Epstein’s release from a Florida prison on sex crime convictions — lists Bruce Ratner of Forest City Ratner Companies as a “strategic relationship to be leveraged” in a proposed $250 million activist growth fund. The document lists Bruce Ratner alongside Jerry Yang of Yahoo, Eric Schmidt of Google, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Michael Bloomberg, David Rockefeller, Mort Zuckerman, Carl Icahn, and Rudy Giuliani.
Bruce Ratner was listed as a relationship to be leveraged. The document was produced eight months after Epstein walked out of prison. He was already rebuilding, with assistance from the Ratner family of Ohio.
According to Cleveland investigative outlet EJB News, 123 internal Epstein documents reference the Ratner name. Sixteen emails exist between Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff and Kelly Garvey-Ratner — a Ratner family member — discussing social plans, fitness classes, and their children. The most recent of those emails is dated 2016. Eight years after Epstein’s Florida conviction on sex crimes involving a minor.
The Ratners knew what Epstein was. They maintained the relationship anyway.
The Ivanka Connection
Before she joined the Trump Organization in 2005, Ivanka Trump worked at Forest City Ratner — the New York subsidiary of the same Forest City Enterprises whose founding family maintained documented social and financial ties to Epstein’s network while simultaneously paying New Mexico’s Democratic governors to facilitate their development of state land adjacent to and in partnership with Sandia Labs, a nuclear weapons laboratory.
In her own book, she called the Forest City Ratner team “wonderfully patient and accommodating” and “very nurturing of the fact that I might need a place to test my mettle away from my father.”
I am not saying Ivanka Trump knew about Epstein’s crimes when she worked at Forest City Ratner.
Rather, I am documenting Ivanka Trump’s direct personal and professional relationship with the Ratner family — the same family whose members maintained warm social ties to Epstein’s inner circle for years after his conviction. The same family whose patriarch Bruce Ratner was listed in Epstein’s files as a strategic relationship to be leveraged. The same family for whom Herbert Denish, husband to Diane Denish, worked as a lobbyist while his wife was serving at Lt. Governor under Richardson, when the state of NM gave them the Ratner’s company a billion in taxpayer funds to build a subdivision in Albuquerque in partnership with Sandia Labs, of “smart” houses that continuously surveil and collect private personal data on residents.
The Epstein class, it seems, has no problem building systems that investigate people’s every move, as long as those people are just us meaningless plebes.
The Kushner Connection
In July 2018, Forest City Enterprises was sold to Brookfield Asset Management — a Canadian alternative investment firm now managing over one trillion dollars in assets across thirty countries — for $11.4 billion.
Within days of that acquisition, Brookfield struck a separate deal with Jared Kushner’s family company. Brookfield paid Kushner Companies $1.1 billion upfront for a 99-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue — a Manhattan skyscraper Kushner had purchased in 2007 for $1.8 billion, a catastrophic investment facing $1.4 billion in loan payments coming due. The Brookfield bailout saved the Kushner family from financial ruin.
Jared Kushner at the time was a senior advisor to President Donald Trump, with a portfolio that included American policy in the Middle East.
Deborah Ratner Salzberg — daughter of Forest City patriarch Albert Ratner, whose family maintained documented ties to Epstein through 2016 — became Washington DC Region Chairman for Brookfield Properties after the sale. The Ratner family moved directly into Brookfield’s leadership.
Qatar, Kushner, and American Foreign Policy
The fund Brookfield used to execute the 666 Fifth Avenue bailout — Brookfield Property Partners — had the Qatar Investment Authority as its second-largest investor, with a seven percent stake and, according to Senate investigators, “significant influence” that afforded it access to “confidential information that other investors never see.”
Brookfield publicly stated during negotiations that no Qatar-linked entity was involved. That statement was a lie.
This matters because of what preceded it.
Throughout 2015 and 2016, Jared Kushner negotiated directly with Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani — Qatar’s former prime minister — seeking up to $500 million in Qatari investment to rescue 666 Fifth Avenue. Qatar refused. Shortly after Kushner joined the White House, his father Charles met with Qatar’s Minister of Finance at the St. Regis Hotel in New York in April 2017, again seeking help. Qatar again declined.
In June 2017, President Trump publicly endorsed Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Qatar — a dramatic reversal of American policy that the State Department and Pentagon opposed and that nearly destabilized the entire Gulf region. Trump tweeted that the blockade was his idea.
One month later, reports emerged that Brookfield was in advanced talks to rescue 666 Fifth Avenue.
In 2018 — after the bailout closed — Trump reversed his position on Qatar. The blockade ended.
Senator Ron Wyden’s Finance Committee investigated whether Kushner advised Trump to support the blockade while simultaneously seeking a Qatari-backed bailout, and whether the reversal of American foreign policy was connected to the bailout’s completion. Brookfield stonewalled the investigation twice, refusing to provide documents. The investigation was never resolved.
Trump and Brookfield Today
In October 2025, the Trump administration and Brookfield Asset Management announced a formal strategic partnership to build at least $80 billion in new nuclear reactors across the United States using Westinghouse technology. Brookfield owns Westinghouse.
The company that bailed out Jared Kushner with Qatari money, that acquired Forest City and its documented Epstein connections, including Mesa del Sol, that stonewalled a United States Senate investigation twice — is now Donald Trump’s partner in American nuclear infrastructure.
Same Epstein-connected company that paid Herb Denish. Same Epstein-company Diane Denish and alleged child sex abuser Bill Richardson gave half a billion in state funds to partner with Sandia Labs, a nuclear weapons lab, to build a modern-day Truman show residential subdivision in Albuquerque.
What Holds This Together
People who encounter this kind of reporting often reach for the word “conspiracy.” I want to offer a more precise framework. Conspiracy implies a secret meeting, a mastermind, a single point of control. What I am describing is something more durable and more dangerous.
The Epstein Class is a network held together by two forces operating simultaneously: mutual benefit and mutual exposure.
The benefit is obvious — money, access, political protection, deal flow. The exposure is less obvious but more important. When a United States Attorney closes the deal on a pedophile’s ranch nine months before becoming the chief federal law enforcement officer in the state where that ranch sits, he has compromised himself. When a governor who flies on a sex trafficker’s plane and visits his properties receives nearly $300,000 from a company whose founding family is in the same sex trafficker’s files, while legislating half a billion in public financing for that company and also credibly accused of abuse by Epstein survivors, he has compromised himself. When a state Attorney General takes a sex trafficker’s money for twenty years, he compromises himself. When a president’s son-in-law receives a billion-dollar bailout from a fund backed by the sovereign wealth of a country whose foreign policy fate is in his hands, run through the same company that compromised the governor and lt. governor of New Mexico, he has compromised himself.
None of these people necessarily knew the full scope of the net in which they were each a knotted node. They didn’t need to. The network functions through entanglement, not omniscience. It weeds itself of people who have strong moral or ethical stances, because the corruption is clear early on to anyone seeking to join. Once you’re in — once you’ve taken the deal, accepted the money, closed the transaction — you are no longer a disinterested party. You become a node. And nodes protect the network because protecting the network means protecting themselves.
The Larger Question
Epstein began his operational life in the early 1990s as what intelligence analysts would recognize as a classic honeytrap and blackmail operation — the kind historically run by state intelligence services. His patron was Les Wexner. His operational partner was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Robert Maxwell — a confirmed Israeli intelligence asset who penetrated Sandia National Laboratories in 1985. The Bronfman family, whose business empire was a corporate ancestor of Brookfield Asset Management, was part of the same network.
What began as state-adjacent intelligence infrastructure in the 1980s has evolved since then into something that serves no single state anymore. It serves capital — money — itself. Specifically, it serves the capitalist economic model pioneered by Milton Friedman, called “neoliberalism,” in which the “liberal” means free markets, not free people.
Ronald Reagan, for whom Friedman was an economic advisor, was the first neoliberalist United States president. He was a republican. But the democratic party in the United States followed his lead on economic matters. Democratic party leadership decided in the Reagan era to quietly stop being the party of labor unions and the working class, and to become a neoliberalist economics party, with more progressive social policies on issues like abortion, women’s rights, civil rights and gun control to set them apart. Regardless of political party, the United States has had nothing but neoliberalist presidents ever since.
Transnational neoliberal capitalists operating through real estate, sovereign wealth funds, and the revolving door between finance and government — across jurisdictions, above accountability, beyond the reach of any single nation’s laws — are the people the Epstein compromat blackmail enterprise came to represent. Not a nation. Not a single intelligence operation. Not one political party or the other.
The Epstein Class. The Epstein class: A transnational neoliberalist economic network of sociopaths who believe so strongly in the important of a free “market” and the endless accumulation of wealth that they are willing to use just about any means necessary to keep it flowing from the bottom to the top, where they live. Epstein’s blackmail child sex trafficking ring, and his generous financial gifts to people and institutions, were merely part of managing the social aspects of that broader network whose overriding goal is financial power for a select few, and forever hardship for the rest of us.
That’s why it’s so hard to get a grasp on “who” is to blame, because it’s not a single person, intelligence operation, nation or political party. The Epstein Class is the most noxious outcome of transnational neoliberal economics itself.
Democrats took the money in New Mexico. Republicans took the employment and the bailout in New York. The same transnational company connected both. The same transnational company is now building nuclear reactors for the United States government. Governments themselves have become secondary to capital, though the illusion of nations and political parties continues to serve the interests of the Epstein Class by giving the rest of us some sort of identity with which to differentiate ourselves from one another and to invoke in battling amongst ourselves.
This is why no one has been held accountable for what happened at Zorro Ranch. Not because the evidence doesn’t exist. Not because survivors haven’t come forward. Because the people responsible for accountability are the same people who were paid by the network, employed by the network, bailed out by the network, or are currently in business with it. To investigate your own, in this network, is to ensure your own downfall in the process.
The club is real. You are not in it. I am not in it. Annie Farmer was not in it either.
Neither were the other children, young women and, yes, even young men, abused at Zorro Ranch whose names we still do not know.
More to come.
I just subscribed to your writing at the Cornerstone rate, based on this article alone. Please keep up the great job of investigative journalism at this time of fear, intimidation and hesitation. Thank you!!!! 🇺🇸🕊️
Alisa, I think you’re the only person in America who sleeps less than I do. I don’t know how you do this a massive amazing work. My Lord it’s exhausting just to read it and the most exhausting thing. Is that every day what I see is that with Donald Trump learned in 2016 was that he was a fool he was working in a real business dealing with all kinds of headaches and problems. It was then that he came to realize politics that’s the thing I should’ve been doing all this time is the biggest piggy bank in the world and all you have to do is shove your hand into it as far as you wanna go all the way up to the shoulder and then use the other arm. Damn. I don’t think there’s any willpower in Congress to fix this. Epstein could be dead for all. We know Trump will be dead. The daughters and the son will be dead, but this shit will go on forever. I don’t see how we ever get out of this. And why did some outrage father not track Jeffrey down in the dark of night and garrote him I’ll never know.