Famed reporter dumbstruck by GOP gift to MAGA millionaire amid Epstein controversy

MAGA millionaire Don Huffines' race for Texas comptroller got easier last week after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appointed him to the newly vacant post and left one famed journalist stunned. Why? Huffines has ties to an infamous property once owned by Jeffrey Epstein.Huffines was exposed in February after his wife was revealed to have been the mystery purchaser of Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, a sprawling New Mexico complex central to the disgraced financier’s supposed plan to “seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women,” the New York Times previously reported. The Justice Department had also received a tip that the property is the burial site of at least “two foreign girls.”The Huffines family purchased the property in 2019 using an anonymously registered shell company, and was documented by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez – a journalist whose reporting has uncovered a number of previously unreported revelations regarding Epstein – as having maintained an advanced communications network at the property she suspected may have been used to surveil two nearby nuclear weapons laboratories.“Don Huffines is the man on whose watch huge portions of that ranch – a site of child sex trafficking likely used to collect blackmail material on powerful scientists and politicians associated with the nuclear weapons industry in New Mexico – were ordered to be excavated and reconstructed, often without proper licensing,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote in an analysis published Saturday on her Substack. “He is the man who has kept the ranch’s military-grade FCC microwave radio licenses – the communications infrastructure this publication has documented connecting Zorro Ranch to Sandia Crest Tower – active and under the management of Epstein’s own former ranch manager.”As for Abbott, Valdes-Rodriguez joined Huffines’ opponent in his race for comptroller – Democrat Sarah Eckhardt – in condemning the GOP governor for his apparent attempt to hand Huffines an easy victory.“Abbott, announcing the appointment, praised Huffines as ‘a fifth-generation Texan, successful businessman, and proven conservative leader.’ Eckhardt, his opponent in November, said Huffines ‘can’t win on his own’ and accused the governor of skirting the voters to install him in the seat before the election,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote.“She is right about the sequence. Whatever happens in November, Don Huffines will have run the office for months as an appointee first – hiring, restructuring, and setting priorities with the full power of incumbency, none of it ratified by a single ballot.”Huffines proudly touts his support of President Donald Trump in his bid for comptroller, and his son, Russell Huffines, was hired by the Trump administration last June as associate director of agency outreach, where he’s paid 83,500 a year, RealClear Investigations has reported.