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© 2026 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES  8/24/26

Party in power has the greatest opportunity for corruption

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

    Big black headlines, usually reserved for natural disasters or political upsets, announced, “Sheryl Williams Stapleton found guilty on all counts.”

    We could see it coming. When the best defense your lawyer can come up with is that you stole from your co-defendant and not taxpayers, you’re in big trouble. 

    Many wonder why Stapleton would risk everything on what the AP described as “a yearslong scheme to divert money from public schools to a friend’s company in exchange for kickbacks.” She had everything – a great job with Albuquerque Public Schools and an important post as the long-time House Majority Leader. She used both positions to steer school and state business to an educational software company owned by an old buddy.     Both were convicted in the same trial of stealing money from state and federal governments.

    Old reporters like me have seen it before. Power, influence and ego metastasize as entitlement and rationalization: “I deserve this.” Their inflated sense of self-importance shields them from the notion they might get caught.

    They are floating above the rubes – that is, you and me.

    Now cue up the chorus of curmudgeons who will proclaim our state legislators are “all crooks.” In truth, for every lawmaker who finds a way to make a buck, ten more step down because they can no longer afford to serve.    Most in our unpaid “citizen legislature” lose money because they’re self-employed or take leave from their jobs to serve. Expenses exceed per diem.

    Besides the financial sacrifice is the personal sacrifice. Several people come to mind.

    Beginning in 2009 House Speaker Ben Lujan (father of our U.S. senator), was away from his duties without explanation. He was quietly getting cancer treatment because he didn’t want his illness to cloud legislative business. People noticed his absence. Rumors rumbled. He went public in an unforgettable opening-day speech in 2012.

    “I’ve learned that being diagnosed with a chronic condition, like cancer, can happen to anyone,” he said. “I have seen firsthand the importance of access to health care for all.”

    Lujan stayed in the saddle through the session. He died that year.

    In 2011 Rep. Jeanette Wallace, R-Los Alamos, her face gray from sickness, was in her 20th year of service. It was her vote that moved a brutally hard-fought budget in a divided House. With her death after the session, Republican moderates in the Roundhouse went extinct. 

    And there was Rep. Abbas Akhil, D-Albuquerque, who was proud to become the first Muslim to serve in the Legislature in 2019. As an engineer and scientist, he was a valuable fellow. He stepped down after one term because he was missing too much family time, a problem they all have.

    While we’re on the subject of public corruption, we should acknowledge that New Mexico’s decision to not pay legislators can lead to dubious decisions and really bad legislation. Rep. Marion Mathews, D-Albuquerque, said this year that as volunteers “we don’t have a lot of strict ethics rules. A ton of money flows to legislators because the rules are so weak.” 

    In this atmosphere of looking the other way, the Legislature’s trial lawyers, all Democrats, were able to pass a law that benefits themselves and not us rubes. Since 2021 they’ve been harvesting money from doctors, who are leaving the state in droves. (Like everybody else, I’ve waited months this year to see a specialist. I don’t feel served by this law. Do you?)

    Here’s the big takeaway: The party in power has the greatest opportunity – and the most cover – for self-dealing. This leads us to tandem denials by both parties. The Democrats see nothing amiss in Santa Fe and point to blatant graft in Washington D.C. The Republicans don’t talk about D.C. and want you to think all the corruption is in Santa Fe. The only difference is that in Santa Fe corruption is prosecuted, at least some of the time.

    Either way, the rubes are paying.

© 2026 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES  8/10/26

Revealing Epstein’s sorry sojourn in New Mexico

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

    We value privacy so much in New Mexico it’s a personal ethic. That’s the first of four reasons why Jeffrey Epstein’s activities at the Zorro Ranch could go undetected for years.

    Epstein bought 10,000 acres in southern Santa Fe County from the family of former Gov. Bruce King in 1993. The parcel sits on a lonesome stretch of NM 41 between Galisteo and Stanley. He didn’t raise public eyebrows until 1995.

    “Build a 30,000-square-foot house in the middle of WayOutThere, call it the Zorro Ranch, and people are bound to notice,” wrote Shonda Novak, of the Albuquerque Tribune, in June 1995. Epstein told her “It’s just a normal home.”      He also said, “I’m pretty much of a hermit.”

    Epstein shared that his New York friends thought New Mexico was “somewhat desolate,” but he thought New Mexico was “the prettiest, most spectacular state by a long shot.”

    He was “very security conscious.” Novak reported: “Current and former Zorro ranch hands say they have been sworn to secrecy. And some say they have been required to sign confidentiality agreements barring them from discussing details about the project or its owner.”

    Locals were also tight-lipped.

    “We just don’t interfere in people’s lives out here,” said a merchant. “We help people out when they want it, but when they want to be left alone, we leave them alone.”

    Epstein isn’t the first rico or movie star to gravitate here for the isolation and privacy. We’ve accommodated many such people seeking refuge from the limelight. 

    By September 1995, Steve Terrell, of the Santa Fe New Mexican, had learned more. Epstein’s palace was twice the size of the county’s largest home. Epstein was a money manager from Manhattan who practiced yoga, shopped at Wild Oats, and bought $600 bed sheets.

    “They’re nice people,” a local builder said. “They should be a welcome participant in the economy of New Mexico.” 

    Welcoming the money is reason number two that Epstein could fly beneath the radar. His financial spigot funded many a worthy cause and political campaign. This got sticky in 2006 when Florida police accused Epstein of having “sex with five teenagers as young as 14 in his Palm Beach home after luring them to give him massages.” Some politicos, including Gov. Bill Richardson, had to give Epstein’s political contributions to charity.

    Reason number three is that we tend to be innocents. Realtor Pat French told Terrell that in the early ‘90s she was trying to help Epstein find a suitable property and stopped by the high-end resort where he was staying. Epstein had at least three teenage girls with him, about the age of her own daughter. “I just assumed they were his daughters,” French said.

    This is the backdrop to the legislative Truth Commission investigating Epstein and Zorro Ranch. Created by the House this year, the commission just released its first report. One nagging question: Why did Epstein get a pass here from 2006 until he died in jail in 2019?

    According to the report, Epstein became a convicted sex offender with a 2008 plea deal but didn’t have to register as a sex offender in New Mexico because of a loophole in state law. Law enforcement never searched his ranch for firearms, forbidden to a felon. That might have uncovered evidence of sex trafficking.

    Which brings us to reason number four: Friends in high places thanks to generous political contributions. 

    “What we’ve seen is there may have been preferential treatment to Epstein as he came and went to New Mexico,” said Rep. Andrea Romero, D-Santa Fe, who chairs the commission.

    As sensitive and closely watched as the commission’s work is, we might expect it to tread carefully around politics, but we’ve seen some missteps.

    Senate Minority Leader Bill Sharer, R-Farmington, and Senate Republicans demanded that the commission interrogate gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland and U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury. Haaland once rode on a plane alleged to be owned by Epstein. This is old and debunked. The Senate Rs accuse Stansbury of maybe having a former employer with possible links to Ghislaine Maxwell. Said Stansbury, “False and libelous.” If Sharer really wanted to help, she said, he’d use his influence to get the U.S. Department of Justice to cooperate.

    Stansbury has already met with the commission and supports its work.

    Now the commission’s two Republican members complain that Romero hasn’t kept them in the loop and that edits were made to the report without their knowledge. They want the Haaland plane ride included in their investigation.

    So is it political to delete Haaland’s much discussed plane ride or political to include it? For the sake of purity and clean hands, they should include it. And although Romero thought she was communicating well with her fellow commissioners, she needs to try harder.

    This is not about tallying the number of Rs and Ds in its pages. It’s about following the facts, wherever they lead.   

© 2026 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES  8/3/26

CYFD sending kid alone across border violates our sense of right and wrong

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

    Two days after CYFD assured the public that it was successfully addressing its high caseloads and recruiting new foster families, a story broke that the state agency charged with protecting children walked a teenager to the Mexican border and ordered him to rejoin his mother in Juarez. The mother he hadn’t lived with in nine years. The mother deported by Texas on drug charges. The mother CYFD first said was abusive but then reversed itself to force reunification. The mother CYFD claimed to have vetted by phone. 

    CYFD sent the teen, a U.S. citizen with a heart condition, across the bridge at night to meet his mother. He bolted and ran across three lanes of traffic toward El Paso, where he spent 10 days in a homeless shelter before Texas and Mexican authorities took him to Juárez.

    We see again and again that the state Children Youth and Families Department doesn’t just have staffing and program issues, its decision makers come up short on common sense and common decency. However, the newly created Office of the Child Advocate alerted the state’s Attorney General, who has sued to get the boy returned to New Mexico. The governor’s spokesman defended CYFD and attacked the AG.

    My dad used to talk to us about “right and wrong.” To him it was that simple – no shades of grey. This incident violates most people’s sense of right and wrong. Both candidates for governor get that, even if the governor doesn’t.

    Republican Gregg Hull told the Albuquerque Journal: “If my administration allowed this to happen, and I didn’t know about it, I’d step out and own it. The buck stops with the Governor’s Office.”

    He added, “I can think of one policy that needs to be implemented immediately: Never turn over a 15-year-old at the international border unescorted.”

    Hull, a three-term mayor of Rio Rancho, said it was necessary to understand who made the decisions and why. “If the Governor’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office were informed about this, why did they ultimately let this go forward?”

    On his website, Hull calls for clear standards, accountability, caseload limits for caseworkers, modern data systems, and safety first in placements.

    Democrat Deb Haaland, a former Interior Secretary and congresswoman, said in a news release: “The decision to send a child across the border alone is unacceptable. My heart breaks every time a child is harmed because of poor policy. Kids need to be kept safe and right now CYFD fails to meet that responsibility.”

    For some time, Haaland has promised an “overhaul” of CYFD. She’s said she would appoint a qualified secretary and direct them to increase staff, rebuild partnerships and standardize foster recruitment and certification. That’s fine, but she also proposes restructuring CYFD. Instead of being a state agency with a cabinet secretary who answers to the governor, it would be under an independent commission.

    Haaland and Hull both get points for stating clearly that what happened here is wrong, something the governor notably didn’t do, but Haaland’s desire to give CYFD more independence is misguided. 

    In April the state Department of Justice released a 216-page report after investigating CYFD for a year. The report described a department that operates in isolation and avoids accountability. It routinely resists or ignores requests from law enforcement, courts, the Legislature and the public. There is no transparency. Further separation would only make this worse.

    Maralyn Beck, who leads the New Mexico Child First Network, is the state’s most credible watchdog. She has warned against removing CYFD from the governor’s control. In an April op-ed she wrote that serving children requires CYFD to work closely with other departments, and that requires having the same bureaucratic parents.

    “(I)t’s worth mentioning that not one other state has removed its child welfare department from its governor’s office,” Beck wrote. “Not one. Nada. Zilch.”

    Beck said she understands how impatient and desperate we are for change. “But, as someone working in this space daily, I also know that the last thing this agency needs is more uncertainty and instability.

    “Solutions exist — but please, this isn’t it. There is a fragile balance here, and lives are at stake. Do not be shortsighted on this. We don’t need to separate CYFD from the governor’s control. What we need is a governor who takes more control by taking to heart the chain reaction and interconnectedness of all child-serving agencies.”

    Candidate Deb Haaland, are you listening?