I offer my news, investigations and analysis for free, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Please like, comment, share and subscribe, paid if you can. Paid subscribers get exclusive access to my personal Diary in Exile posts about moving to Spain, and exclusive access to members-only Friday Brown Bag Lunch Live Video Broadcasts where I answer reader questions about anything and everything. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Just four $25 tips per day keep me writing full-time. Thanks!
Mexico State Representative Andrea Romero resigned on Tuesday from the part-time job at the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office that this newsletter documented last week. She stepped down for the reason accountability journalism exists: the state’s top lawyer, alerted by reporters like me and the outraged public who read and watch us, put in writing that what she was doing broke the law.
Which is exactly what The Pugilist said she was doing.
Attorney General Raúl Torrez, in a surprisingly ethical move that signals to me the state’s power brokers are losing patience with Romero, sent a letter to every district attorney in New Mexico making clear that a sitting legislator cannot draw a salary as an employee of a prosecutor’s office. A day later, Romero, who knew this law but took a job as an assistant district attorney with NM District One anyway in May, was out.
That is where the story should have ended, with a quiet correction of a bad arrangement. Instead, Romero, who continues to demonstrate textbook characteristics of narcissism — namely that she has never believed the rules apply to her personally — reached for the microphone and told a different story, one in which she is she wronged party, the AG is the villain, and the villain’s secret motive is to protect Jeffrey Epstein.
For what it’s worth, there are two more textbook examples of narcissism in her reaction. One, she blame-shifted her own law-breaking to the state’s attorney general, who is following the law, and played the victim. Two, she projected her own Epstein Class protectionism (Romero is the person who personally erased any mention of current New Mexico gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland from the commission’s first report last month, despite Haaland having flown on a plane chartered for her and Gary King by Epstein himself) onto Torrez.
Romero is unfortunately not rare in New Mexico, a one-party state where the lack of a real opposition party has led to a Germany-sized territory that is run like Tammany Hall, by a cabal of democrats who are often only democrats because that’s the party New Mexicans most often vote for. Their only real interest, as Romero has demonstrated time and time again, is taking advantage of the system for personal gain, and pointing the finger of blame at everyone but themselves when they get caught.
The reason this story is important at a national and even international level is that this “truth” commission was the one and only official legislative body that seemed positioned to actually do something about the Epstein Cabal that operated in the orbit of the Zorro rape ranch. Run by Romero, however, it has turned out to be exactly what this publication told you it was: Yet another grift designed to protect those who protected Epstein who still hold political, social, judicial and financial power in New Mexico.
The “someone told me it was fine” defense
Romero’s central claim is that she “sought and had received explicit authorization” to hold both jobs, and that Torrez’s office knew about it all along. Her resignation, in her telling, was forced only when the AG supposedly reversed a policy on August 31 — three days ago. It’s nonsense.
Here is the authorization she leaned on. In 2024, Torrez’s office issued an opinion clearing Representative Andrea Reeb to serve as a special prosecutor in the Alec Baldwin case — a narrow, single-matter appointment, not a standing salaried post. Torrez now says that opinion has been read far more broadly than it was ever meant to be. His Monday letter draws the line in plain language: a special appointment confined to one specific case is one thing; a legislator on the payroll of a DA’s office as a regular employee is another, and offices doing the latter should treat it as unlawful and fix it without delay.
The precedent Romero stood on has already collapsed once. Baldwin’s own lawyers argued that Reeb’s dual role was unconstitutional, citing the very same law Republican legislators are now citing against Romero. Reeb ended up resigning from that case. So the “green light” was never a green light for what Romero did, and even in its original, narrower form it did not survive contact with a courtroom.
A misread opinion about a one-case appointment is not a permission slip for a salaried job at an office whose budget you help write. Romero knows the difference. She is a lawyer.
She’s also a dishonest, self-serving opportunist. And she needs to be removed not only from her DA job, but from her position on the truth commission, immediately.
The part where the conflict of interest becomes a conspiracy
Unable to defend the arrangement on the merits, Romero did what she has done before when the record catches up with her: she changed the subject to herself. She called the AG’s letter “an attempt to disrupt” the work of the Epstein Survivor Truth Commission she chairs. She warned, without naming a single one, that other lawmakers would be forced out of their jobs too. She closed with the line that serving is “the greatest honor of my life” and that no effort to distract will succeed. That she was even hired as an assistant DA is curious, given her lack of experience. Her most recent job was as an ostrich farmer and, yes, I am trying not to laugh as I type that.
Consider who she is accusing. Raúl Torrez is the attorney general who reopened the criminal investigation into Epstein this year, sent investigators to the former Zorro Ranch, and sued the federal government to force the release of the Epstein files. If there is a public official in New Mexico who has spent political capital trying to pry open the Epstein network, it is the man Romero just accused of trying to bury it. Turning the state’s most active Epstein investigator into the secret protector of Epstein’s legacy is not an argument. It is a smoke bomb. I had wondered whether he was part of the “truth” commission’s coverup, but now that he has fearlessly stood up to Romero, I have to say no. In fact, I think Torrez might be the only hope New Mexico has of actually getting some kind of accountability from the protection network in New Mexico, two of the biggest names in which are his predecessors: Gary King and Hector Balderas.
This is the tell, for Romero. This is the final straw that should remove all doubt that she cannot be trusted. When a conflict of interest gets reframed as an attack on abuse survivors, this is DARVO, the reframing is the story that narcissists so often employ. It converts a simple, damning fact — a legislator took a salaried executive-branch job she was not allowed to hold — into a melodrama where questioning her is the same as siding with a dead sex trafficker. Readers of this newsletter have seen that maneuver from this commission before.
The publicist tell
One more detail worth sitting with. Romero’s statement was not issued from her legislative office or in her own plain voice. It came through a New York public relations firm — the same firm that represents people like Monica Lewinsky. If Romero is struggling financially, as she claims as her reason for needing the assistant DA job, you have to wonder where she came up with the dough to hire a spin doctor in Manhattan to massage her corruption for her. A part-time lawmaker in a state that famously pays its legislators nothing retained a Manhattan crisis shop to manage the fallout from quitting a job she took even though it was not legal to do so. The instinct on display is not accountability. It is image control. It’s Romero thinking she is yet again above the law. Like every other New Mexico politician who ever interacted with Epstein or, like Romero, protected those who did.
The pattern, one more time
Before she held elected office, Romero ran the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities — a taxpayer-funded agency representing nine northern New Mexico cities, counties, and pueblos in the shadow of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The coalition took in roughly $200,000 a year in public money, half of it federal. Romero was its executive director. She was also, conveniently, the owner of the private consulting firm the coalition paid to supply that executive director. She was hired to steward public funds, through a company she controlled, to pay herself. As if that’s not bad enough, the organization presented itself to the public as the voice of the pueblos and farmers whose lands have been polluted with forever byproducts of the nuclear weapons industry by the Los Alamos National labs, such as uranium. But in reality, Romero was playing friend to the little guy while lobbying Washington for ever more money for the labs.
Then came the 2018 special audit from the New Mexico State Auditor. It found more than $51,500 in improper expenditures on her watch, including $26,862 routed to her own consulting company. The specifics read like a parody of expense-account excess: an $1,850 dinner in Washington, D.C., billed to Los Alamos County despite including alcohol the coalition’s own policy forbade; $307 for a dozen Major League Baseball tickets; roughly four dozen meals submitted with no receipts at all. The auditor concluded the spending violated not just the coalition’s travel policy but state law.
Then the public asked for its money back. By 2020, the coalition — itself scrambling to survive a federal inspector general’s demand that it return up to $300,000 — asked Romero to repay about $8,000 in impermissible reimbursements. She had handed back roughly $2,800 earlier, dismissed the whole controversy as politically motivated, and let the larger request sit unanswered. The coalition collapsed. She went to the Legislature. The bill, quite literally, went unpaid.
Here is the part that should stop you cold. The audit landed in the middle of her first campaign for the state House. Voters knew about it. She won anyway. And that is the entire problem about New Mexico politics in miniature. Loyalty has always been more important than ethics. It’s what made New Mexico so inviting to the defense industry, and to Jeffrey Epstein.
Two coalitions, one pattern
One corrupt act by a young official can be written off as a rookie mistake — a person in over her head, sloppy with a credit card, badly advised. Fine. People grow.
But two? Two is a pattern. The executive who paid herself through her own firm and then stiffed the public on the refund is the same legislator who took a salaried DA job she was barred from holding and, when caught, called the enforcement a plot against Epstein’s victims. Same move, bigger stage: take the public’s money in a way the rules forbid, and when someone notices, insist that the noticing is the real crime.
In New Mexico, this pattern is not a disqualification. It is closer to an ideal résumé for an elected official. The audit did not end Romero’s career; it launched it. The conflict of interest did not cost her the commission gavel; she is still holding it. We have built a political culture in which getting caught mishandling public funds is a stepping stone — provided you never admit it and always keep a villain on hand.
That arrangement has a cost, and the people of northern New Mexico have been paying it for years. It is time to stop rewarding it.
Andrea Romero should resign — not only from the DA’s office she has already left, and not only from the Epstein commission she is using as a human shield, but from public life altogether. Her own campaign biography, before the law degree and the coalition and the consulting firm, lists a career in international development and ostrich farming. The ostriches, at least, never had to draft an audit response. New Mexico would be better served, and Andrea Romero better suited, if she went back to her little company specializing in “probiotic ostrich eggs.”
Lawmakers who break laws, commit embezzlement, extortion, fraud, enable human trafficking MUST be REMOVED ASAP from any official office. There is no more protecting the status of public officials, disguising themselves as “ABOVE THE LAWS” they force upon the general population.
Success. Keeping them honest — well as honest as this Motley Crue could ever be — one step at a time.
Keep up the good work, and stay safe out there! 👍