Sen Whitehouse: Republican conspiracy theories make America less safe.

                                                                                                               

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THIS COMMENT SAYS IT ALL:

Senator whitehouse is the example that all politicians should follow,,thank you senator whitehouse for exposing this scum bags.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

241K subscribers

Mar 24, 2026

March 24 | Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) delivers opening remarks at a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing on Jack Smith, hosted by Ted Cruz. Sheldon Whitehouse represents Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate, where he champions policies to uphold American leadership in the world, protect our planet in a changing climate, and hold the powerful accountable. For more from Senator Whitehouse: Website: http://whitehouse.senate.gov/ Twitter: https://x.com/SenWhitehouse Instagram:   / senwhitehouse   Facebook: /   / senatorwhitehouse   TikTok: /   / senwhitehouse   Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/whitehouse.s... Threads: https://www.threads.com/@senwhitehouse Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/15QVZrP...

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About Damn Time

Epstein’s New Mexico Horror House Will Finally Be Investigated

Shockingly, his ranch there—where unspeakable things went on—was never so much as dusted for prints. At long last, that’s going to change.
Virginia Heffernan/

March 23, 2026

Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico   

Since November 2024, dozens of states have moved to protect their internal sovereignty against President Trump’s campaign to consolidate an autocratic central government.

The flamboyant resisters have mostly been loudmouths like Illinois, New York, and California. But now New Mexico, a quieter player, has entered the fray. The New Mexico state legislature is bringing rigor, tactical acumen, and moral imagination to the cause.

Last month, the New Mexico statehouse launched a Truth Commission, chaired by state Representatives Andrea Romero and Marianna Anaya. 

Their plan, which won bipartisan support in the majority-female state legislature, is Hague-like in scope: to investigate human rights violations and atrocities carried out in New Mexico by the child rapist Jeffrey Epstein and his many enablers.

A four-person panel is now holding public hearings and conducting private interviews about crimes and cover-ups, using subpoena power and a $2 million budget. A request for proposals from the House of Representatives to law firms that may want a piece of this action went out on March 13.

The physical investigation of Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in Santa Fe County started March 9, and it turned sinister in short order. New Mexico Public Lands Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard proposed that cadaver dogs pore over the state land around Zorro to search for the bodies of girls alleged to be buried there. “The state land was used almost as a buffer, a shield to hide what activity was occurring on the ranch,” she said last month.

From a drone’s-eye view, the ranch looks cadaverous itself. It’s a pale-flesh-colored colonial monstrosity of 28,636 square feet that sits goonishly amid the sagebrush in the high desert, sucking it dry.

Though Epstein bought the land in 1993 from Bruce King, who was then New Mexico’s Democratic governor, his Temu Xanadu, with its helipad, giant pool, firehouse, and private airship, always irritated locals for putting “inordinate burdens on the scenic and water resources of our region,” as a local journalist wrote in 1999.

Nationally, the face of the Truth Commission’s investigation is New Mexico Representative Melanie Stansbury, who as a member of Congress has had a look at the unredacted files. “I spent a fair amount of my time this morning looking at the files on Zorro Ranch,” she told reporters last month. “There aren’t words to describe what are in those files.” Stansbury has repeatedly emphasized to the press that “both girls and boys” were abused at the ranch.

On Thursday, after sitting through Attorney General Pam Bondi’s evasions in a closed-door “fake hearing,” Stansbury reported on social media: “If anyone wondered whether there is a coverup, there is a coverup happening in the Department of Justice and in the White House.”

Stansbury has 1.2 million followers on TikTok alone. (For comparison, Connecticut Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who is also outspoken on the Epstein affair, has 125,000.) Comments on Stansbury’s videos are effusive. “Ma’am, thank you,” read a recent one. “I’m from Florida and follow you for the truth.”

New Mexico’s Truth Commission is clearly ambitious. But what does conducting an investigation of a local crime scene have to do with defying federal overreach?

That is the real motivation for these New Mexico lawmakers. Back in 2019, when Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking of minors, the state geared up for a probe into his activities in the region. Girls and women, after all, had alleged for decades that Epstein groomed, abused, or raped them, many as teenagers, at Zorro Ranch. New evidence surfaces all the time that New Mexico was the site of some of Epstein’s gravest misdeeds, not to mention his obscene plan to seed a master race with his own DNA. What’s more, the FBI at the time was investigating all of Epstein’s global houses of horror: properties in France, the Virgin Islands, New York, and Florida.

But before the New Mexico investigation could even take its first step, the feds stopped it in its tracks. The then New Mexico attorney general said in 2019 that federal prosecutors in New York told him they were running a complex, multi-jurisdictional investigation, and New Mexico should just back off.

And thus seven years have passed without Epstein’s ranch being so much as dusted for fingerprints. Zorro has also changed hands. Whatever evidence was there at the time of Epstein’s 2019 death in prison has likely been Lysoled away and hauled off in GOT-JUNK trucks. 

How could criminals manage to get officials to let their radioactive crime scene devolve into tumbleweeds? Through the usual trick of the Trump-Epstein class: Butter everyone up. In this case, Epstein sucked up to the most powerful men in the state with his trademark mix of money and “massages.”

Epstein was especially close to Bill Richardson, a Cabinet secretary under President Clinton and governor of New Mexico from 2003 to 2011. Richardson regularly visited Zorro Ranch for sex, according to Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre. Or, rather, as she clarified in a 2016 deposition, Richardson came for “massages,” which, she said, “means sex.”

Like Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Richardson, who died at 75 in 2023, just after evidence emerged that connected him closely to Epstein, denied ever meeting Giuffre. He also denied being friends with Epstein, though documents have since revealed otherwise. (Richardson, the author of How to Sweet-Talk a Shark, was known for canny diplomacy.)

In 1993, King, who served three nonconsecutive terms as New Mexico governor between 1971 and 1995, sold Epstein the tract of land in Stanley on which he built his ranch. Epstein had the mansion built later in the 1990s, and the King family still owns the land around it.

King died in 2009, but his son Gary, who served as New Mexico attorney general from 2006 to 2014, was even closer to Epstein. When Gary King was running for governor in 2014, he took money from the child rapist via a rat’s nest of secret shell companies.

During the failed 2014 campaign, King and his running mate, Deb Haaland (later secretary of the interior), also took one of Epstein’s jets to fundraising events in Washington, D.C. King long maintained that he didn’t know the source of the plane, but an email sent to Epstein on August 21, 2014, says that Gary King “wanted to speak to you about possibly using your plane to get him from Sante Fe evening of Sept 8th (around 8pm) so he could make a breakfast in DC on Sept 9th.”

Several members of the powerful King family show up in Epstein’s so-called little black book.

Whatever the Truth Commission turns up, the formation of such a boldly conceived investigation right now, while Donald Trump is back in the White House and obfuscating about Epstein, comes not a moment too soon.

Though always imperfect, truth and reconciliation commissions on human rights abuses—notably, the ones launched in South Africa on apartheid in 1996, and in Canada on Indian residential schools in 2008—change the record. Such commissions foreclose historical denialism and are the minimal act of compensation that a government must provide witnesses, victims, and survivors of state-abetted violations of human rights.

The investigation in New Mexico says what no one else has: that the American people deserve a candid audit of the catastrophic injustices of the age of Trump. It’s early days, but read the brief. The Truth Commission asks New Mexicans, and all of us, to raise our expectations and imagine the possibility, post-Trump, of contrition, justice, and even reparations.

Virginia Heffernan

Virginia Heffernan is the author of the Substack newsletter Magic + Loss.

THE NEW REPUBLIC DAILY

                                                                                                             

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Well, this is a first for us: We’re blasting out two breaking news alerts in one night, because the news is simply that big!

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BREAKING: Florida Democrats just picked up a second seat in Tuesday's special elections

Brian Nathan's win is the 30th red-to-blue flip of Trump's second term. The GOP has flipped zero seats in that span.

David Nir Mar 25

Florida Democrat Brian Nathan (Brian Nathan Facebook)

In the second massive upset of the night for Florida Democrats, Brian Nathan, a Navy veteran and union official, flipped a state Senate seat that became vacant after Gov. Ron DeSantis tapped its previous occupant to serve as his lieutenant governor.

Nathan overcame a huge financial disadvantage to beat Republican state Rep. Josie Tomkow and win the Tampa-area 14th District. Nathan was leading by a margin of 50.2 to 49.8 when Tomkow conceded.

Earlier in the evening, Democrat Emily Gregory won a separate special election for a state House seat in Palm Beach County that includes Donald Trump’s seaside lair of Mar-a-Lago.

DeSantis himself put the 14th District in peril for the GOP when he elevated Sen. Jay Collins to replace his previous second-in-command last August. Though the district had voted for Donald Trump by a 53-46 margin in 2024, four years earlier, it had gone for Joe Biden 51-47. On Tuesday night, it returned to form.

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The governor, however, seemed to understand the risk he’d created for his party. DeSantis refused to call a special election, prompting the ACLU to file a lawsuit to compel him to take action. He finally scheduled the contest in October, 73 days after he picked Collins.

In a fitting twist, while observers speculated that the term-limited DeSantis had wanted Collins to succeed him, the relationship between the two Republicans turned “nuclear bad in the blink of an eye,” as NBC reporter Matt Dixon put it. (Collins did eventually launch a bid for governor but has polled poorly in the GOP primary, often in the single digits.)

Nathan focused on improving public education and addressing soaring property insurance rates, but he also called Tomkow out for allegedly not living in the district—a requirement for sitting lawmakers under the state Constitution.

As in the state House, Florida Republicans hold a two-thirds majority, but with Nathan’s victory, Democrats now need to flip just one more seat to break the GOP’s supermajority in November.

This is now the second state Senate seat Republicans have lost during Trump’s second term after a governor chose an incumbent senator as their new lieutenant governor. The same thing happened in Iowa in January of last year, when Iowa Democrat Mike Zimmer won a deep-red seat held by Chris Cournoyer, who was tapped by Gov. Kim Reynolds to fill a vacancy.

In addition, Nathan’s win represents the 30th legislative seat that has flipped from red to blue since Trump returned to the White House. During that time, Republicans have flipped zero Democratic seats.

Thank you so much for being a free subscriber to The Downballot! To support our work, we’d be grateful if you’d become a paid subscriber.

                                                                                                            

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More than a month ago, we called your attention to an unusual special election:

Morning Digest: The next big special election is happening in Trump's backyard David Nir and Jeff Singer · Feb 18 Read full story

Well, it did indeed turn out to be big—very big indeed, as we explain in our breaking news alert below.

No other outlet covers special elections as closely as we do, and we do so for a very important reason: They can tell us a lot about the political environment today and how it might look come November.

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BREAKING: Florida Democrats flip Donald Trump's home district in Palm Beach

Emily Gregory will now represent Mar-a-Lago—and Trump himself

David Nir Mar 24

Florida Democrat Emily Gregory, second from left (Emily Gregory campaign site)

Florida Democrat Emily Gregory scored a major upset on Tuesday night, flipping the legislative district that includes Donald Trump’s waterfront lair of Mar-a-Lago.

Gregory, a first-time candidate who runs a fitness business serving pregnant and postpartum women, defeated her Republican opponent, financial planner Jon Maples, by a 51-49 margin to win the 87th House District in Palm Beach County.

The race for this slice of the South Florida beachfront was both caused by and delayed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appointed one of his few loyalists in the state legislature, Rep. Mike Caruso, as Palm Beach County clerk to fill a vacancy last August.

As he often has in the past, though, DeSantis refused to call a special election, very possibly because he feared how it might turn out. Only after Gregory filed a lawsuit did he finally act, nine weeks after Caruso resigned.

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If DeSantis was worried, he was right to be. Even though Republicans poured resources into the race and outspent Democrats by a wide margin, it wasn’t enough to save Maples, who earned Trump’s endorsement in January.

Trump also cast a ballot—presumably for Maples—and he did so by mail.

"Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all," Trump said at an event on Monday. For weeks, he has demanded that Congress pass legislation mandating “NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY - ILLNESS, DISABILITY, TRAVEL.”

Trump experienced a surge in popularity in his own backyard in his last election, but it appears to have been temporary. In 2020, he carried the 87th District by just a hair, 49.8 to 49.3. Four years later, by contrast, he jetted out to a 55-44 win, while Caruso prevailed by an even wider 59-41 margin in his final reelection campaign.

Gregory, though, overcame that deficit by emphasizing her plans to address the soaring cost of living, particularly the skyrocketing cost of property insurance in this environmentally vulnerable coastal community.

Notably, she prevailed even though registered Republicans accounted for about 46% of the electorate, with Democrats making up 36% and independents 18%.

Republicans will still retain their supermajority in the state House, but Gregory’s victory offers a much-needed boost to Florida Democrats, who are hoping for similar upsets in even higher-profile contests on the November ballot. They’ll also have the chance to break the GOP’s supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature.

And they’ll take a measure of satisfaction in knowing that the state’s most famous resident is now represented by a Democrat.

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