A prominent commercial contractor with government ties built a secluded residence in the New Mexico desert for Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch from former Democratic Governor Bruce King in 1993. Then he hired Bradbury Stamm Construction, a company better known for building classified facilities atLos Alamos National Laboratoryand Kirtland Air Force Base, to erect him a mansion on the 10,000-acre property. They also built him a sprawling courtyard, a private airstrip with a hangar and helipad, a ranch office, a firehouse, and a seven-bay heated garage.
Bradbury Stamm is the largest industrial commercial contractor in New Mexico, and is not known for constructing private homes, according to journalist and authorAlisa Valdes-Rodriguez. Yet they did it anyway. The company’s telephone number was listed under a series of contacts pertaining to Zorro Ranch in Epstein’s personal phone book, according to unredacted pages released by the Justice Department.
Why the company would go out of its way to take on the Zorro Ranch project is not clear, though Valdes-Rodriguez speculates that it could have something to do with Ghislaine Maxwell’s father.
“Bradbury Stamm holds classified construction contracts at the New Mexico nuclear weapons labs that Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, penetrated with backdoored spy software on behalf of Israeli military intelligence in the mid-1980s, per publicly available FBI files and the testimony of Rafael Eitan, the Mossad operations chief who ran Maxwell as an asset,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote. “Bradbury Stamm brings in hundreds of millions each year in contracts.”
Zorro Ranch, located roughly 30 miles south of Santa Fe in the high desert, was rumored to be a hotbed of illicit activity while Epstein held the keys. Some of the notorious child sex offender’s victims, including Virginia Giuffre, claimed they were trafficked at the New Mexico estate.
Emails issued by ranch staffers allege that at least two girls were killed and buried under the building by Epstein’s order, according to documents made public by the Justice Department via the Epstein files. Epstein even contemplated turning the estate into a headquarters for genetic engineering experiments.
The property has since changed hands. In 2023, it was purchased by Donald Huffines, a former Texas state senator nowrunning for comptrolleras a self-styled “Trump Republican.” The Huffines family has renamed the site “Rancho San Rafael.”
The Trump administration intervened in a New Mexico investigation at the property in 2019. In February, New Mexico lawmakers voted unanimously to pursue another investigation into Zorro Ranch, creating a bipartisan “truth commission” to examine the site’s history. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez alsoorderedhis office to reopen the criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch, demanding “immediate access to the complete, unredacted federal case file.”
The Department of Justice has reached a second agreement to fork over taxpayer dollars to President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Abrief documentfiled in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims Friday stated that the parties had agreed to a settlement “in principle,” but needed more time to finalize the details.
It’s not yet clear how much money Trump intends to hand off to his ally, in addition to the$1.25 millionsettlement the DOJ agreed to last month.
Friday’s settlement relates to a civil suit Flynn brought against the government, alleging that the U.S. Army had illegally garnished his retirement pay after it found he had accepted compensation from a foreign government source without first seeking approval from the Department of Defense, Lawfare’s Anna Bowerwroteon Substack.
Flynn previously alleged he was wrongfully prosecuted for making false statements to federal agents as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—even though hepleaded guiltyto lying, twice.
The Trump administration is coming after Jimmy Kimmel—again.
