Trump's New Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, Went to a Military Boarding School in Roswell, New Mexico. Yes, It Matters.
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On April 2, 2026, President Donald Trump fired his loyal Attorney General Pam Bondi and replaced her with someone he hopes will be even more loyal, a man widely referred to only as his personal criminal defense lawyer.
Within hours, Todd Blanche — the hard-faced attorney who had sat beside Trump through three criminal prosecutions, who had defended him when he was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York — appeared on Fox News to declare the Epstein matter closed.
“I think that to the extent that the Epstein files was a part of the past year of this Justice Department,” Blanche said, “it should not be a part of anything going forward.”
Approximately 2.5 million pages remain unreleased. Roughly half of everything the law required to be made public. And almost all co-conspirator information in the files remains redacted for some reason. Trump’s name appears in the files more times than the word “Jesus” appears in the Christian bible. But, sure. There’s nothing to see here. Or so says Todd Blanche.
What has not been reported, until now, is where Todd Blanche went to high school, and why, in the context of the rest of the New Mexico based reporting I’ve been doing on the Epstein files and Zorro Ranch, it absolutely matters.
New Mexico Military Institute
Todd Wallace Blanche attended the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, New Mexico, graduating in 1992. It’s a military boarding high school and junior college whose graduates often go on to military colleges afterwards. Blanche was there from approximately 1989 to 1992, between the ages of fourteen and seventeen.
Readers of this series will recognize Roswell immediately. It sits at the southern terminus of the U.S. Route 285 corridor — the geographic spine of New Mexico’s nuclear and intelligence infrastructure that this series has spent months documenting in detail. That corridor runs north from Roswell through the high desert, skirting past Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, on through the Galisteo Basin where Henry Singleton’s San Cristobal Ranch shares nearly two miles of fence line with what was Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, into Santa Fe — where Epstein cultivated and compromised scientists associated with the Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Santa Fe Institute.
As this series has established across multiple installments: Robert Maxwell sold Israeli-backdoored PROMIS software to Sandia and Los Alamos in 1984. His daughter Ghislaine introduced Epstein to the Santa Fe Institute’s scientists in the 1990s, through her father’s endowed professorship there. Henry Singleton — OSS veteran, Teledyne founder, Reagan’s personal financial trustee — bought the ranch adjacent to Zorro Ranch in 1986, starting with San Cristobal as the anchor of what would become nearly a million acres along that same Route 285 corridor. Epstein bought Zorro Ranch from the sitting governor of New Mexico in 1993, directly next door to Singleton.
Blanche, who was born and mostly raised in Colorado (with a short year in Florida), was a student at the southern end of that corridor from 1989 to 1992 — the years the FBI’s Albuquerque investigation into the PROMIS sales had already been buried by Reagan’s Justice Department, the years Singleton was consolidating his ranch holdings, and one year before Epstein arrived.
The man who just declared the Epstein investigation closed attended a military high school and junior college in the geographic heart of the story he is now burying — a college with close ties to the military industrial complex whose leading scientists Epstein’s pedophile blackmail ring, an intelligence operation, targeted, a college that told a 15-year-old student to “sleep off” being sexually assaulted on campus.
The Institution
NMMI is the only state-supported military college in the western United States. Its Hall of Fame criteria specifically cite the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal as a qualifying honor. Nearly 100 cadets per year go on to one of the five United States military service academies. Its alumni include 23 generals and flag officers, hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, actor Owen Wilson and Sam Donaldson — the longtime ABC News anchor who recently appeared on national television to compare the handling of the Epstein files to Watergate.
The school has its own documented record of institutional protection over underage victims of sexual abuse. It has been sued multiple times for failing to address sexual assault on its campus, including a 2019 case in which a 15-year-old female cadet who reported being raped was told by a staff sergeant to “sleep it off.” In a separate case, a former cadet named Joshua Adam Williams pleaded guilty in 2015 to federal child pornography charges for crimes committed while enrolled at the school.
The institution that shaped the acting Attorney General now overseeing the Epstein files has its own unresolved record of protecting institutions over the sexually exploited children they harm.
The Path to Trump
While many political commentators dismiss the Blanche appointment as nothing more than Trump appointing yet another yes-man in his inner circle, a closer look reveals a man who was in the Epstein crimes orbit long before he was hired to represent Trump personally. His seeming willingness to protect high-profile people involved with the Epstein pedophile blackmail ring might be what drew Trump to him in the first place, rather than the other way around.
Blanche left Roswell after graduating from NMMI, worked his way through Brooklyn Law School at night while employed as a paralegal at the Southern District of New York, and graduated cum laude in 2003. After graduating cum laude from Brooklyn Law School in 2003, he worked as an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell and clerked for two federal judges before joining SDNY as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in 2006 in the violent crimes unit, eventually becoming its co-chief. He left in 2014.
The years Blanche spent at SDNY — 2006 to 2014 — are the years that matter most to this story.
In 2007, federal prosecutors in Florida were developing a 53-count indictment of Epstein that a federal judge later described as representing conduct for which Epstein could have faced life in prison. That indictment was quietly buried through the non-prosecution agreement negotiated by U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta. The NPA did not merely protect Epstein. In a deliberate amendment from an earlier draft — someone changed the language specifically — co-conspirator immunity was broadened from the Southern District of Florida to the entire United States. Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig said publicly of that clause: “Why would he want to do that unless he was protecting powerful people who he was afraid of?”
The co-conspirators covered by that immunity — unnamed, unnumbered, protected across the entire country — were never charged. They have never been identified in full. They remain protected to this day.
While that immunity was being constructed in Florida, Blanche was a violent crimes prosecutor at the most powerful U.S. Attorney’s office in the country. SDNY was simultaneously building its own Epstein investigation under Preet Bharara — an investigation that ran for years and produced no charges during Blanche’s tenure or for five years after he left.
When Epstein was finally arrested in 2019, the case was assigned not to SDNY’s sex crimes unit but to its public corruption unit — the unit that handles cases involving powerful officials and politically sensitive figures. The then-U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman declined to explain publicly why. The prosecutor who actually brought Epstein to trial, Maurene Comey, was fired by the Trump administration in July 2025. Berman himself had been fired by Trump in a late-night Saturday confrontation in 2020 — a firing Berman refused to accept until the Deputy Attorney General personally intervened.
Blanche’s specific role, if any, in SDNY’s Epstein investigation during his years there is not established in the public record. What is established is that he spent eight years as a violent crimes prosecutor at the office that managed — and contained — the Epstein matter for more than a decade, and from which prosecutors were fired by Donald Trump if they tried to do something about Epstein and his co-conspirators.
Blanche’s path to Trump ran through a specific network. He represented Paul Manafort — Trump’s former campaign chairman — beginning in 2019. He also represented Igor Fruman, a Moscow-born Giuliani associate implicated in the Trump-Ukraine scandal, and Boris Epshteyn — a Moscow-born senior Trump advisor whose surname is the Russian transliteration of Epstein.
The scandal, for those who’ve forgotten, happened when Trump withheld congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine and pressured its president to announce an investigation into Joe Biden — his likely 2020 opponent — using Giuliani associates Parnas and Fruman, Soviet-born operatives with ties to Ukrainian oligarchs and Russian-adjacent organized crime networks, as cutouts to arrange the scheme, resulting in Trump's first impeachment.
In February 2023, Epshteyn and Manafort referred Trump to Blanche. He resigned from his firm the same day, writing to colleagues: “I have been asked to represent Trump in the recently charged DA case, and after much thought and consideration, I have decided it is the best thing for me to do and an opportunity I should not pass up.”
Trump was convicted on all 34 counts. He rewarded Blanche at the time with the number two position at the Justice Department.
What Blanche Did With That Position
In July 2025, Blanche personally traveled to federal prison and interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell — Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, the woman who ran his trafficking operation — over two days. The full contents of that interview have not been made public. (Shocking, I know.) Shortly after, Maxwell was transferred from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security camp in Texas. Her conditions improved materially.
Maxwell has said she would testify about what she knows — about Trump, about Clinton, about others — if she receives clemency. The man who can now decide whether to pursue clemency for the woman who ran Epstein’s trafficking operation is the same man who interviewed her privately and presided over her improved prison conditions.
In March 2026, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon sent Blanche a formal letter. Its language was unambiguous: “By withholding this unclassified document from the U.S. Congress, you are covering up for pedophiles and obstructing my investigation.” Blanche had personally intervened to block the DEA from releasing an unredacted memorandum related to Operation Chain Reaction — a major federal investigation into drug trafficking, prostitution, and money laundering by Epstein’s organization. The task force that ran that operation — the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces — has since been dismantled by the Trump administration.
Blanche did not release the document.
While managing the Epstein file burial, Blanche simultaneously oversaw the removal of over 200 career DOJ employees — including FBI agents — who had worked on Trump-related prosecutions. He boasted about this at CPAC in March 2026: “There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions.” Three fired FBI employees subsequently sued, citing his own public comments as evidence of illegal termination.
On April 2, 2026, in his first hours as acting Attorney General, Blanche told Fox News the Epstein files should not be “part of anything going forward.” He said the DOJ had released all the files, a bald lie. He said it was not a crime to party with Epstein, also untrue. He said there was no evidence supporting new prosecutions. Lie after lie after lie.
Representative Robert Garcia, ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, responded the same day: “This is a lie. About 50% of the files have been released and per our subpoena it’s illegal to withhold them.”
Representative Thomas Massie, the Republican co-author of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, addressed Blanche directly: “Congratulations AG Blanche. Now you have 30 days to release the rest of the files before becoming criminally liable for failure to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”
Blanche has not responded to either.
The Pattern
This series has spent months documenting the network that surrounded Jeffrey Epstein’s operation in New Mexico — the OSS veterans, the defense contractors, the ranch holdings along the Route 285 corridor, the communications infrastructure, the political protection that shielded him for decades. The central argument has been consistent: Epstein did not operate alone, the military and intelligence infrastructure preceded him, and the pattern of institutional protection that kept him free did not begin with Epstein, nor did it end with his death.I offer these posts freely, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Please subscribe, paid if you’re able, and share my work if it moves you. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Thank you! A.
It's worse than 6 degrees of separation! It's like there is no separation. It's a continuous string of marginalized lowlifes that have been doing dastardly things for a long, long, long time—all within a stone's throw from that horrific ranch! This cannot be coincidence. It's all too logistically negotiated.
What?! Ever time I think this storyline can’t get more strange, bizarre and weird, something like this is uncovered. Seriously, is there no bottom to this cess pool?