The Man Whose Wife Secretly Bought Epstein's Zorro Ranch Now Controls an Economy Larger Than Russia's.

Nobody voted for this.

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Donald Huffines was not elected. It doesn’t matter. He was installed, just like his friends in Russia.

On Thursday, July 2, Texas Governor Greg Abbott appointed Donald Huffines to serve as Comptroller of Public Accounts — the chief financial officer of the state of Texas — effective August 1.

Huffines was not elected to this office. The election for it is in November. He is the Republican nominee, and he will face Democrat Sarah Eckhardt at the polls in four months. Abbott did not wait for the voters. Hours after acting comptroller Kelly Hancock announced his unexpected but politically convenient and tidy resignation on Wednesday, the governor handed the office to Huffines outright.

Readers of this publication know exactly who Don Huffines is.

He is the man whose wife, Mary Catherine Huffines, secretly purchased Jeffrey Epstein’s 7,600-acre Zorro Ranch in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, in 2023, through an anonymously registered shell company in which she is named as the owner trustee and her and Donald’s son Colin the manager — the same legal mechanism Epstein himself used to acquire the property thirty years earlier. Don Huffines is the man on whose watch huge portions of that ranch — a site of child sex trafficking likely used to collect blackmail material on powerful scientists and politicians associated with the nuclear weapons industry in New Mexico — were ordered to be excavated and reconstructed, often without proper licensing. He is the man who has kept the ranch’s military-grade FCC microwave radio licenses — the communications infrastructure this publication has documented connecting Zorro Ranch to Sandia Crest Tower — active and under the management of Epstein’s own former ranch manager, Brice Gordon.

All of this has been reported and documented in these pages, record by record, deed by deed, FCC filing by FCC filing.

That man now controls the treasury of Texas. And he and his wife have very close ties to Russia.

We’ll get to that.

What the office actually is

The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts collects the state’s taxes, disburses its funds, certifies its budget, manages its unclaimed property, and oversees the Economic Stabilization Fund — the state’s rainy day fund. The office sits at the center of the finances of an economy larger than the entire gross domestic product of Russia. Texas officials love to make that comparison when they are boasting. It applies just as well when we are worrying.

The comptroller decides, in meaningful ways, what gets audited and what does not. What gets scrutinized and what glides through. Which contracts and entities feel the state’s financial gaze and which never do.

Abbott, announcing the appointment, praised Huffines as “a fifth-generation Texan, successful businessman, and proven conservative leader.” Eckhardt, his opponent in November, said Huffines “can’t win on his own” and accused the governor of skirting the voters to install him in the seat before the election.

She is right about the sequence. Whatever happens in November, Don Huffines will have run the office for months as an appointee first — hiring, restructuring, and setting priorities with the full power of incumbency, none of it ratified by a single ballot.

The pattern of the placement

Consider the timeline this publication has assembled over the past half year or so.

In 2023, the Huffines family quietly acquires Epstein’s New Mexico ranch through a shell LLC. Excavation begins. The FCC licenses stay live, managed by Epstein’s former ranch manager.

In February 2026, the New Mexico House votes 62 to zero to create the Epstein Truth Commission — a bipartisan, subpoena-powered body charged with building an official record of what happened at Zorro Ranch.

That same month, this publication reveals the Huffines purchase after it is uncovered by a local newspaper.

In March, Huffines wins the Republican primary for Texas comptroller with 57 percent, defeating the Abbott-backed acting comptroller, Kelly Hancock, by 35 points. President Donald Trump endorsed Huffines. This publication previously documented that Russell Huffines — another of Don and Mary Catherine’s five children — holds a position in the Trump White House Office of Cabinet Affairs, and that digital traces of that position were being quietly scrubbed after our reporting made the family’s ranch ownership public. Also scrubbed from the Internet was evidence of Russell’s nuptial party held at the ranch in New Mexico, for which sources told this publication guests were required to sign nondisclosure agreements before attending. The party stand in contrast to the Huffines family’s official story about their intentions for the ranch; after their names were made public, they hired a Dallas public relations firm to come up with a positive spin, and soon thereafter announced they’d bought the place to turn it into a “Christian retreat.” The media ran with it as though that were true, but there was no existing documentation to support the story. There might be now, but that’s likely because it was created as damage control.

In April, this publication documents that the chief procurement officer selecting the Truth Commission’s legal counsel — the law firm that will actually run the investigation into Zorro Ranch — is a former employee of the Texas Comptroller’s office. We wrote then that Huffines would “almost certainly” take over that office in January 2027, after the election. We alerted commissioner Mariana Anaya about the conflict of interest, and her response was to say the commission saw no problem in the chief procurement officer, Gerardo Paredes, Jr., having worked for the same department Huffines now controls, under his similarly Trump-endorsed predecessor. (Dear readers, that’s the day I realized the truth commission was a farce.)

What “cooperation” looked like when the commission searched the Huffines’ ranch

In recent days, Albuquerque’s KOB 4 Investigates obtained bodycam footage from inside the March search of Zorro Ranch — the first public look at how the New Mexico Department of Justice’s criminal investigation actually unfolded on the ground. All media outlets previously had reported simply that the Huffines were cooperating with investigators.

The footage, as KOB reported it, shows what the word “cooperation” meant in practice. Huffines’s representatives, lawyers among them, remained on site for the entire search, more than thirteen hours of it, hovering over everything investigators did. The search was governed by consent agreements — the owner’s terms, agreed in advance — and agents were reminded on camera that those agreements had to be followed before any intrusive search or seizure could occur. Lawyers had to be consulted before a carpet could be pulled up. Before property could be seized. Investigators can even be heard discussing when their body cameras should be turned off. At the end of the day, documentation of the evidence collected was handed to the owner’s representatives.

Read that again. This was a consent search, not a warrant search. When the NMDOJ thanked the property owners for their cooperation in March, and the wire services repeated the phrase, what it meant was this: the family that owns the property under criminal investigation set the conditions under which investigators could look at it, stationed its lawyers alongside the agents for thirteen hours, decided what could be touched and taken, and received a copy of the evidence log on the way out. This should have made headlines coast to coast. It didn’t.

Attorney General Raúl Torrez has said his office is working hard to build a complete account of what happened at Zorro Ranch, and he has made no promise of charges. Survivors and the public, meanwhile, have flooded the state with tips — including calls for cadaver dog searches of the property. Whether those searches happen, and on whose terms, now unfolds against a new fact: the man whose lawyers dictated the limits of the last search is a sitting state official in Texas, with very close ties to Russia, a nation whose economy is smaller than the one Don Huffines now controls.

The Moscow meeting

There is one more thread readers need to hold in their hands as they absorb this appointment.

In August 2018, Senator Rand Paul led a secret delegation to Moscow, where he delivered a letter from President Trump to Vladimir Putin’s administration — a letter whose contents were never made public. Present at the meetings with senior Russian officials, including former ambassador Sergey Kislyak — a central figure in the Mueller investigation — were Mary Catherine Huffines, whose public persona is that only of a doting conservative wife and homeschool mother, Don Huffines, his twin brother Phillip. At the time, Don Huffines was a Texas state senator representing a slice of North Dallas. He held no federal office, no foreign policy role, no diplomatic credential of any kind.

How did a state senator end up in that room? And perhaps more importantly, why was his wife in that room? The same wife who would later purchase Zorro Ranch from the Belorusian woman who inherited from Jeffrey Epstein?

Paul has been described in press accounts as a longtime family friend of the Huffineses, and campaign finance records show Mary Catherine donating to the Paul family’s political operations — Ron’s and then Rand’s — going back to the 1990s, before she married Donald Huffines.

During that meeting, Russian MP Leonid Slutsky publicly urged Paul and the others to advocate for the release of Maria Butina — the Russian agent then in U.S. custody, who had spent years infiltrating the NRA and Republican political circles, exactly the circles the Huffineses inhabited as major Texas conservative donors.

The brothers and Mary Catherine told no one they were going. Their social media accounts carried no mention of the trip; it became public only when wire photos of Paul’s delegation surfaced with both their faces in the frame.

Look closely at those photos. In the official photograph distributed by the Federation Council of the Russian Federation — the Kremlin’s own camera — and published by the Dallas Observer on August 7, 2018, Mary Catherine Huffines sits at the delegation table directly beside Don Huffines, at his left shoulder, behind his Cyrillic name placard. She appears in video of the meeting as well. Her name appears in no caption. Her presence appears in no written account of the trip — including her husband’s own op-ed about it, despite his constantly crowing about her presence at other events with him. For eight years, every story about this delegation has said “the Huffines twins,” and for eight years, nobody asked who the woman at the table was, or bothered, it seems, to even notice she was there.

In some photos, it even appears she has been rather poorly photoshopped out. Which is weird.

After Texas media asked what the hell Donald Huffines was doing meeting with top Russian officials, Huffines’s office said he made the trip because Texans were worried about election security, and that he was in Moscow demanding Russia “stop meddling in our elections.” Huffines himself went further: he said he wanted to look the Russians in the eye and secure a public acknowledgement that they would leave Texas elections alone — and he came home claiming victory, telling Dallas television that Russian ministers had promised, publicly and privately, that they would not meddle in the upcoming Texas elections. He was, he said, taking the Reagan approach: trust, but verify.

Sit with that. A Texas state senator, ten weeks from his own reelection, flew to Moscow on a secret trip and returned announcing he had personally extracted a non-interference pledge from the Kremlin. A political scientist at SMU observed at the time that Huffines was talking to the wrong people entirely — Russian legislators control nothing; Putin’s security services do the meddling. The pledge was worthless, the mission absurd on its face, and the explanation raised more questions than the trip itself.

Think about this, too:

A sitting president, Donald J. Trump, who lacks impulse control to such a staggering degree that he broadcasts secret military operations on his social media account, chose, in that instance, to communicate with Putin by sealed letter, hand-carried by a Senate ally — with a Texas state senator, longtime Paul-family donor, and future Epstein-ranch owner along for the trip, on a mission whose stated purpose collapses under thirty seconds of scrutiny.

No one has yet bothered to ask what was happening in the life of Jeffrey Epstein at the moment the Huffines went to Russia with a secret letter for Vladimir Putin from Donald Trump. Well, no one but me. And here’s what I found I can tell you: In August 2018, Jeffrey Epstein, sensing something or not, gave journalist James B. Stewart an off-the-record audience at his Manhattan townhouse — the visit Stewart published after Epstein's death — in which Epstein suggested he held damaging information about powerful people. There is no known connection between the two events, but it tells you where Epstein's head was: he was maneuvering.

Maybe other people were, too.

The questions about Mary Catherine

Hold the Moscow photograph in your mind as you read what comes next.

Since this publication began reporting on the Zorro Ranch purchase, people describing themselves as having worked for the Huffines family have contacted me. What they describe, consistently, is a household in which Mary Catherine Huffines — publicly presented as a stay-at-home Christian homeschooling mother of five — is the one in charge. They describe a woman with long-standing, independent political interests of her own.

Mary Catherine sat at the table in Moscow, unnamed and unremarked, erased by photoshop, deliberately not mentioned by a husband who otherwise mentions here nonstop, at a meeting attended by sanctioned Russian officials, where a Russian MP lobbied for the release of Maria Butina, a female Russian spy.

Some of my sources have gone further, raising the possibility of connections between Mary Catherine and Russian intelligence networks. I want to be precise with you about what that is and what it is not. It is a claim, from sources, that this publication has not verified and does not assert as fact. We publish it here only as a line of inquiry we are actively pursuing.

But consider what the Butina case itself proved about the world the Huffineses move in. For years, a pretty young Russian agent worked the NRA conventions, the prayer breakfasts, the donor dinners — the exact rooms the Huffines family inhabited — and most of Republican politics mistook her for a hot young gun nut, the girl of their dreams. These are circles that do not see women as operators. Putin knows this. That blindness is a documented feature of the Butina record, and it has been a feature of Russian tradecraft since the KGB: work through the people the targets are least prepared to take seriously. The wives at the dinners. The women at the table.

Mary Catherine Huffines sat at the table in Moscow. The Kremlin photographed her. An American newspaper published the photograph. And for eight years, nobody — including the newspaper — thought to ask her name, or care who she was. And who she was turns out to be the person who bought Zorro Ranch from another Russian-speaking pretty young thing: Karina Shuliak. Whatever else is true, that inattention to all of these women — or more accurately, the limited sexual/wife attention — is exactly the environment in which such things go unexamined. It also happens to be Putin’s kompromat playbook.

What happens now

The Epstein Truth Commission’s investigation into Zorro Ranch is live. They’ve issue subpoenas. You will notice, none of them are for Mary Catherine Huffines, or Karina Shuliak. Or Maria Butina.

The property at its center is now owned by a family whose patriarch was just installed to run the finances of the second-largest state in America — placed there by gubernatorial appointment, ahead of the election, the day after the seat opened. In November, Texans get a vote. Until then, the man whose wife bought Epstein’s ranch runs the money for an economy larger than Russia’s.

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I offer this post freely, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Please like, share and comment if you find the below story valuable. Also subscribe, paid if you can. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Thank you!

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