The US Attorney for New Mexico Who Wrongly Prosecuted a Taiwanese Scientist for Espionage — but Ignored a Pedophile Who Was Probably a Spy for Israel

John J. Kelly had Q clearance, seven years as New Mexico's top federal prosecutor, and multiple victim reports from Zorro Ranch. He acted on none of them.

Jun 01, 2026

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The closest thing I could find to a photo of John J. Kelly is this picture of his wife Suedeen Kelly (in red) at some sort of house party with former NM governor Bill Richardson (beige blazer) and other people.

Readers of The Pugilist already know what the national press has largely ignored: Jeffrey Epstein was not a financier. He was, in the words of security consultant Gavin de Becker — a man who has advised presidents and intelligence agencies — “a construct.” A funded fiction. The structure beneath that fiction, as this publication has documented across months of reporting, ran directly through New Mexico’s nuclear weapons infrastructure: through Robert Maxwell’s sale of backdoored PROMIS software to Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos, through Ghislaine Maxwell’s placement on the Santa Fe Institute board and her introduction of Epstein to the Los Alamos founding scientists, through the military-grade microwave communications system Epstein built in 2016 pointing from Zorro Ranch to Sandia Crest Tower.

If you’re new here, that’s the foundation. This piece is about the man who was supposed to be watching but looked the other way.

The U.S. Attorney

John J. Kelly became U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico in December 1993 — nine months after he had personally served as Jeffrey Epstein’s attorney-in-fact, signing the closing documents on the Zorro Ranch purchase and filing the transmittal letter to the New Mexico State Land Office on Epstein’s behalf. Those documents — SDNY_GM_00173766, SDNY_GM_00173767, and the Hinkle Cox firm letter of March 15, 1993 — are in the federal Epstein files and were first reported by this publication.

Kelly held that office for seven years. His jurisdiction covered Zorro Ranch and, critically, both Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory. His CV, filed with the City of Albuquerque — where he is, as we speak, a mayoral appointee to the city’s Ethics Board — confirms Kelly held Top Secret and Q security clearances from the Department of Justice and the Department of Energy, and was specifically tasked with investigating the unauthorized removal and possession of classified information at the national laboratories.

The federal guardian of America’s nuclear secrets in New Mexico was the same man who had, months before taking that job, been Jeffrey Epstein’s personal legal representative.

And nobody in power in New Mexico seems to think this is a big deal.

What His Office Did Not Do

No investigation of Zorro Ranch was ever opened during Kelly’s seven-year tenure. The documented record of what his office chose not to act on is not limited to the single report to the FBI from Maria Farmer about her sister Annie, though that is what Kelly has told the local media (and they, true to form, accepted this at face value.)

Federal files contain another report, this one from a man who states that in December 1993 — Kelly’s first month as U.S. Attorney — he was taken to Zorro Ranch, drugged, and sexually assaulted. Yet another report comes from a witness identified in federal proceedings only as “Jane,” who testified that Epstein began abusing her at age 14 and transported her to New Mexico, her abuse dating to the mid-1990s, when Kelly was New Mexico’s United States Attorney. In 1996, Annie Farmer, then 16 years old, told the FBI she had been sexually abused at Zorro Ranch by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. A federal lawsuit filed by twelve Epstein victims against the FBI alleges the Bureau received reports, complaints, and tips concerning Epstein’s trafficking of women and minors continuously from 1996 through 2006 — the first four years of that window falling entirely within Kelly’s tenure.

Annie Farmer is the best-documented of these accounts. She testified about it at Ghislaine Maxwell’s federal trial, naming both Epstein and Maxwell, and her account is in the public record by name. But she was not the only person whose account reached federal law enforcement during Kelly’s years in office. You wouldn’t know this to read local media reports about Kelly and Epstein, however.

Kelly’s office did nothing about Epstein. Not in 1993, when the first reported assault occurred in his first month. Not in 1996, when Farmer’s report was filed. Not in 1997, 1998, 1999, or 2000, when Kelly left office and joined Modrall Sperling, one of New Mexico’s most politically connected law firms, before running for Congress with Bill Clinton, whose name appears in the files, appearing at his fundraiser to speak about their Georgetown friendship.

For seven years, not one of those reports produced a federal investigation of the ranch in New Mexico, under the federal watch of John J. Kelly.

He remains one of the most powerful and politically connected men in the state.

What He Did Do? Ruin Wen Ho Lee’s Life.

Here is what Kelly’s office was capable of doing, when it chose to act.

In December 1999, near the end of his tenure, Kelly stood before cameras and announced the prosecution of Wen Ho Lee — a Taiwanese-American nuclear physicist at Los Alamos accused of downloading classified weapons design data onto portable tapes. Kelly declared that Lee had “denied the United States its exclusive dominion and control over some of this nation’s most sensitive nuclear secrets.” He prosecuted Lee on 59 counts, the most serious carrying potential life sentences under the Atomic Energy Act. More than 60 FBI agents were assigned. More than 1,000 interviews were conducted. Lee was held in solitary confinement for 278 days.

The case collapsed.

Investigators could not prove Lee had passed anything to anyone. The government dropped 58 of 59 counts. Lee pleaded guilty to a single mishandling charge and was sentenced to time served. Judge James Parker issued a formal rebuke from the bench, stating he had been “led astray” by the Department of Justice, the FBI, and specifically “its United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico.” The judge said the government had “embarrassed our entire nation.” He apologized to Wen Ho Lee directly.

Lee was never charged with espionage. He was a Taiwanese-American scientist. He was not Jeffrey Epstein, who by all accounts actually was a spy, and a spy who used a child sex trafficking ring to smuggle nuclear secrets to Israel.

The contrast is not subtle and it is not accidental. Kelly’s office mobilized the entire machinery of federal prosecution — 60 agents, 1,000 interviews, life-sentence exposure, months of solitary confinement — against a man accused of mishandling nuclear data from Los Alamos. During those same years, reports of rape and sexual abuse at a ranch thirty miles from those same laboratories accumulated in federal files and produced nothing. Not a phone call. Not a file opened. Not one interview. Had Kelly’s office investigated, they would have found the spy they tried to create out of We Ho Lee.

There is one more layer. The Wen Ho Lee prosecution framed the Los Alamos security breach publicly as a Chinese espionage problem — generating enormous press coverage about Chinese intelligence penetrating America’s nuclear secrets. What it did not address, and what Kelly’s office never addressed, was the Israeli intelligence penetration of those same laboratories that this publication has previously documented: Robert Maxwell’s sale of backdoored PROMIS software to Sandia and Los Alamos, the FBI counterintelligence investigation into Maxwell’s activities that was shut down, and the social and physical network Maxwell’s daughter had built — through the Santa Fe Institute, through Epstein’s dinner parties with Los Alamos founding scientists, through the ranch itself — that gave an intelligence operation sustained access to the people who built American nuclear weapons. That operation ran thirty miles from Albuquerque for the entirety of Kelly’s tenure and was never examined by his office.

Instead, Kelly’s close friends and associates, people like Herb and Diane Denish, benefitted financially from Epstein’s criminal intelligence and finance network, as Kelly looked the other way.

What He Said

When Albuquerque’s KOAT Target 7 asked Kelly in February 2024 about his appearance in Epstein’s personal black book — which contains not just a work number but his home address and his wife’s direct phone line — Kelly declined an on-camera interview. (In fact, we could not find a single photo of him anywhere in the public domain, which is odd for a man who ran for congress and has held such powerful positions. It suggests he keeps his public profile tightly scrubbed.) He stated he had met Epstein exactly once, at a meeting arranged by Governor Bruce King, at which Epstein expressed interest in buying land.

“I have no clue,” Kelly said of why he appeared in the black book. “You’ll have to ask Mr. Epstein.”

Epstein had died in federal custody in 2019, so asking him was obviously never going to happen — and answering in this manner was not just glib, it was glib and slick as snot.

The documents in the federal Epstein files directly contradict Kelly’s account. He did not meet Epstein once at a land deal. He was Epstein’s legal representative. He signed Epstein’s name. He filed paperwork on Epstein’s behalf with the State of New Mexico. In the eyes of the land records of this state, for the purpose of that transaction, Kelly was Epstein. He did not disclose any of this to KOAT.

Kelly has since told the city of Albuquerque’s spokesperson Dan Mayfield that he “never met” Epstein and “was never aware of any activities beyond the real estate transaction.” His signature is on the closing documents. The documents are in the federal files. They have been publicly available since their release. “Any insinuation that I did, or would have, condoned Mr. Epstein’s criminal conduct,” Kelly has said, “is categorically false.”

Kelly’s record of inaction against Epstein is not insinuation, however. It’s fact.

Who Knows and Has Done Nothing

The documents establishing Kelly’s relationship with Epstein are in the publicly available federal Epstein files, bearing Kelly’s name and his signature. They were first reported by this publication. The Santa Fe New Mexican, the city of Albuquerque, Mayor Tim Keller’s office, and Representative Melanie Stansbury’s office have all now had occasion to reckon with what those documents show.

The New Mexican published a story whose headline centered Kelly’s denial and presented me and this publication as the only voices saying Kelly protected Epstein. The paper did not try to verify what has been written here, preferring instead to make the story one where I say one thing and Kelly says another. Mayfield, meanwhile, told the newspaper the city was “concerned” but accepted Kelly’s statement that the relationship was limited to a single real estate transaction — without apparent reference to the documents that contradict it. Keller’s office has not responded to this publication’s calls or emails at all. Stansbury’s office responded by email that she was unaware of the POA relationship and appreciated being informed. Then nothing changed. Kelly is still on the ethics board. And the state’s political and media elites continue to protect him, as he appears to have protected Epstein.

What none of these institutions appear to have done is look at the documents themselves. They have chosen, instead, to take Kelly’s word.

That’s how shit works in New Mexico.

The Body That Could Act

Kelly currently sits on the Board of Ethics and Campaign Practices of the City of Albuquerque as a mayoral appointee of Tim Keller. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Mexico, asked about whether Kelly’s office had reviewed the 1996 Farmer report, said it cannot “comment on the internal processes or deliberations that occur within our office” and possesses “incredibly limited insight as to whether a previous United States Attorney reviewed a particular law enforcement report three decades ago.”

Translation: We aren’t going to tell you, but also we don’t care because it happened a long time ago.

The New Mexico Truth Commission was created by the state legislature with subpoena power and a mandate to investigate exactly this history. Its initial report is due in July 2026. As of this writing, it has not publicly announced that it has contacted Kelly, requested his testimony, or subpoenaed his records. This publication has previously reported that the commission’s own procurement process for hiring legal counsel appears compromised, with documented PAC contributions from the winning firm’s connected PAC to the commission chairs who oversaw the selection.

John J. Kelly has a story to tell about Jeffrey Epstein, about Zorro Ranch, about what his office did and did not do with the reports that accumulated there over seven years, and about the nuclear secrets he was charged with protecting in the same years he was doing nothing about the intelligence construct operating thirty miles from the laboratories. But because New Mexico is New Mexico, he has not been asked to tell it under oath. And he probably never will be.

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