Gail Armstrong
The New Mexico House minority leader on Wednesday accused the chair of the state’s Jeffrey Epstein “truth commission” of using the panel’s public relations firm to run “political opposition research” on legislators — allegations a Democrat on the panel called “absurd.”
Rep. Gail Armstrong, a Magdalena Republican, said she was “appalled” to review billing records that PR firm Dini von Mueffling Consulting LLC submitted to the Legislative Council Service for its work on behalf of the bipartisan state House commission investigating Epstein’s activities in New Mexico.
“Chair [Andrea] Romero had a taxpayer-funded PR firm running political opposition research on members of the Legislature, digging into our backgrounds and our associates, just before an important election,” Armstrong said in a statement Wednesday.
“And she did it behind the backs of at least half her own Commission. This Commission was created to find the truth for the survivors and victims Jeffrey Epstein left in his wake, not to build political files on her colleagues,” Armstrong added.
Epstein, a financier and convicted sex offender with high-profile ties in New Mexico, owned Zorro Ranch in southern Santa Fe County for more than two decades.
Romero, a Santa Fe Democrat, and Dini von Mueffling Consulting didn’t respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Rep. Marianna Anaya, an Albuquerque Democrat on the panel, called the allegations “absurd,” adding, “in no world did we ask for opposition research.”
The out-of-state PR firm was simply “getting the lay of the land” in New Mexico, Anaya said in an interview Wednesday evening — which she added “any good communications firm” would do.
“It’s not a surprise that they were doing their research about New Mexico,” she said. She never saw a work product as a result of the research, she said, and hadn’t known specifically they were researching legislators.
The PR firm was hired in August to serve as the four-member panel’s media relations manager but quit in early September.
According to copies of the billing records shared by House Republicans, the PR firm billed the state for tasks including an “internal call on other NM state legislature members, political backgrounds, prior work before coming to Commission and legislature, known associates and history.”
