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In a 10-day span in March 2022, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes met with the Peruvian ambassador, honored the director of the TV series “The Chosen,” took part in an opioid discussion, had breakfast with TV’s “Dr. Oz,” rode along serving a warrant targeting child pornography, and hit a VIP reception with U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Other work weeks weren’t as hectic or star-studded. But a review of five years of Reyes’ calendar records shows how the outgoing attorney general spent his final embattled term in office — balancing the business of the state while spending time with a cast of minor entertainment figures and scheduling meetings with dozens of business executives — some of whom had landed state contracts.
These were records that Reyes didn’t want the public to see. His office sued The Salt Lake Tribune and KSL-TV to try to keep them secret, but last week settled the lawsuits and released five years of calendar invites sent to or from Reyes’ Outlook account. In the settlement agreement, the attorney general’s office emphasized that these calendar invites “do not represent a comprehensive record” of how Reyes spent his work days, noting that he had other meetings or discussions that “occurred organically” and were not put on a calendar.
“In addition,” the settlement agreement reads, “the calendar documents may include events or items that the Attorney General did not attend or participate in but gave him an awareness of the events’ occurrence.” These are the same set of records that Reyes’ office prepared for legislative auditors, according to the settlement agreement. Since late last year, auditors have been delving into the workings of the attorney general’s office amid questions about decision-making, travel policies and its efficiency — as well as Reyes’ long-standing relationship with Tim Ballard, the founder of the anti-trafficking nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by several women.
That audit is expected to be released in January, according to the Legislative Auditor General. (Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes is seen at the Capitol, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024.
All told, the attorney general’s office turned over 9,165 pages of calendar invitations for events ranging from a private breakfast in January 2020 with former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to coordinating time in a police shooting simulator with a Florida DJ last March. But the records tell a scattered and incomplete story of how Reyes spent his time from January 2019 to December 2023. Thousands of the records are duplicates and take multiple pages, making it difficult to know precisely how many distinct events the document dump entails.
Per the office’s agreement with The Tribune to release the records, attorneys withheld any calendar entries that were considered personal or campaign-related — although dozens of the entries note days when his children are out of school, car repair appointments and observed holidays. There are, for example, no references to his travel to Nevada after the 2020 election to try to find evidence of fraud in the presidential election; or his 2022 trip to Qatar, paid for by that country’s government, to watch a World Cup match; and there are only isolated references to Ballard, who was Reyes’ friend for a decade and gave Reyes an associate producer credit on his movie “Sound of Freedom” before Ballard was accused of numerous sexual assaults. And last September, months after the attorney general’s office sued The Tribune and KSL-TV , Reyes’ calendar seemingly became more opaque.
In the last four months of 2023, there were 57 appointments where the only subject listed was “Block” and four more titled “Hold” with no other information. Those terms did not appear at all during the year up to that point and appeared only a handful of times in the years prior. Reyes’ senior political advisor Alan Crooks said those “block” entries may have been space he reserved on Reyes’ calendar as they were ramping up for a potential 2024 reelection campaign.
Reyes announced in December that he would not run again . The Tribune initially requested Reyes’ calendars more than a year ago as part of an investigation into Reyes’ relationship with Ballard and how he spent his time in office , but the attorney general’s office denied the request. A reporter appealed the denial and the State Records Committee ordered them to be public, but the attorney general’s office sued the committee and The Tribune reporter in May to block the release.
Another case was making its way through the courts at the same time, this one against KSL investigative reporter Annie Knox, who had requested four months of appointments. Third District Judge Patrick Corum ruled in Knox’s favor in February and awarded Knox’s attorneys $132,241 in court costs. (The figure does not account for the cost of the state’s attorneys in the case.
) The same day Corum issued his order, the Utah Legislature passed a bill to make secret the calendars of all public employees and officials . Gov. Spencer Cox signed the bill into law the next day, protecting his own calendars and those of other Utah leaders.
The change was not retroactive, so it did not affect the lawsuits involving The Tribune and KSL. Here’s what The Tribune found after reporters sifted through the thousands of pages. Meeting with Banjo to ‘make the world safer’ One of the first meetings listed in the calendar invites took place in February 2019, with Ballard and Reyes meeting Damien Patton, the founder of Banjo.
The company said it used artificial intelligence to sift through a massive amount of public and — once given access — state-held data, promising it could identify crimes before they are even reported to police. Reyes’ office had initially bypassed the normal procurement process to give Banjo a $750,000 sole-source contract and the company later won a 5-year, $20.7 million contract with the state .
In March 2019, the calendar invites show a scheduled meeting with Patton and Clint Betts, the president and CEO of tech-promoting nonprofit Silicon Slopes, for a “follow-up” to discuss how Banjo could be used to curb opioid addiction. The next day, Reyes and Patton were scheduled for another meeting with the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration for Utah, Brian Besser, for another opioid discussion. Over the ensuing months, the records show, Reyes had appointments to tour Banjo’s headquarters in Park City, prep for a media interview promoting Banjo’s technology, and for Banjo to take part in a conference call with another D.
C.-based company with a similar product. (Banjo) CEO Damien Patton and his company, Banjo, met with Reyes multiple times in 2019.
Invites show Patton also was scheduled for a meeting with the attorney general’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and the head of criminal investigations; a separate meeting with Reyes’ lead investigators; two meetings with Reyes at the company’s headquarters; and an appointment for Patton to accompany Reyes to honor the winners of a high school robotics competition. In January 2020, Reyes and Patton were scheduled to be in San Francisco where Patton would be on a panel speaking to state attorneys general about how Banjo’s tech could help combat human trafficking. The calendars make clear that Reyes was a major proponent of Banjo, regularly connecting Patton to people who might help elevate the business, and Crooks said he and Reyes helped arrange tours of Banjo’s headquarters for attorneys general from other states.
Then it all came crumbling down after it was reported that Patton, as a young man, had been a white supremacist who was the getaway driver for a shooting at a synagogue . The state terminated the contract with Banjo and a subsequent investigation by the state auditor found that Banjo’s heralded AI capability simply didn’t work and that the state failed to verify Banjo’s claims. Crooks said that in the early days, everyone thought Banjo’s tech was legitimate, including venture capital firms that bankrolled the company.
He noted that the contract was awarded through the normal state procurement process. “You go in [to Banjo’s headquarters] and you’d think you walked into NASA. The screens are up everywhere.
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None of us knew we were being bamboozled at the time,” Crooks said. “If you think it’s real, that this is going to help change and make the world safer, you would tell everyone.” Advocating for National Child ID By 2020, Reyes was throwing his support behind another for-profit, crime-fighting endeavor — National Child ID.
The company, founded by former Green Bay Packer Kenny Hansmire, was selling government agencies cards that could be distributed to parents to write down their child’s name, weight, height, hair and eye color. Parents could also place a child’s fingerprint on the card, and attach his or her photo and hair sample. The idea was to have that information at the ready in case a child is abducted.
In August 2020, Reyes wrote a letter to then-President Donald Trump offering a “personal appeal” for Trump to support legislation that would provide $52 million so that every child in the country could have a card. The calendars show that in 2021, Reyes was scheduled to host phone calls with Hansmire. And in June of that year, contracts show, his office spent $1.
8 million from his budget to buy 652,000 of the NCID cards, plus another 70,000 kits a year for four years, so every Utah kindergartner could have one — even though that was 19,000 more than the number of incoming kindergartners. Reyes became co-chair of the NCID initiative and, according to the calendar invites, had a scheduled meeting about it with state Sen. Kirk Cullimore in 2021.
During the following session, Cullimore sponsored legislation making the program part of state law . From there, Reyes began advocating for the program around the state. His calendar included appointments to promote NCID to sheriffs and he taped interviews and held news conferences advocating for the program.
In September 2021, the records show NCID as a topic to be discussed in a scheduled meeting with Elder Jeffrey Holland, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In August 2022, Reyes traveled to Wisconsin and received — according to a news release at the time — the NFL’s Man of The Year Award. His campaign staff later walked that back, however, since it was Hansmire’s group, not the NFL, who gave him the award.
In 2023, legislative budget analysts said the cards weren’t being distributed as quickly as expected and the attorney general’s office had not reported data on the program. This September, however, the attorney general’s office reported that it had met 100% of the program’s performance goal. Crooks said Wednesday that means every Utah kindergartener’s parents have an opportunity to get a card — not that every child’s parents have been given one.
Parents have liked the program, he said. “I think it’s been very positive to have all that information. If something happens you can just hand it to [police] because minutes count,” he said.
Crooks said he doesn’t know if the cards have helped recover any kidnapped Utah kids. Business pitches are “part of the deal” (Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes speaks during the Salt Lake County GOP convention in Murray on Saturday, April 13, 2024. Crooks said companies pitching new products and technology to attorneys general “is just part of the deal.
All the A.G.’s get pitched.
” Reyes’ calendar invites show appointments routinely scheduled with an array of hopeful sellers. Most of the entries don’t have details of the pitches, but many of those that do include some human trafficking or opioid angle. RIWI Technology, for example, thought its survey and marketing platform could help combat trafficking and Nutriband suggested its fentanyl patch could help keep people from becoming addicted to opioids.
There were makers of DNA tests, AI-enabled weapons detection, mental health services for police officers and software to send text or email blasts. Representatives from Clearview wanted the state to buy its facial recognition software and the state considered it, according to an investigation by Buzzfeed, but backed away because the company wasn’t transparent about what data it would collect and how it would be used. States that did buy it later sued the company for misusing the information.
Many of the meetings with business executives were not at Reyes’ government offices, but at Mac’s Place, an exclusive private club in downtown Salt Lake City. The club has hosted athletes, musicians and political bigshots. Calendar invites also reflect a scheduled 2021 meeting with a cellphone maker for kids, a meeting with a legal tech startup in 2023, and a sit-down with executives from Live View Technology, a security video streaming service that same year.
He also had scheduled appointments at Mac’s with a company that rents more than 2,000 homes in Utah, with organizers of a Polynesian tattoo festival, and the owner of a car racing team. Crooks said Reyes pays for membership to the club with campaign funds and Mac’s proved easier than renting campaign office space downtown. Tim Ballard and human trafficking (Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and Tim Ballard, founder of Operation Underground Railroad, pose for a photo at the group's "Share Our Light" gala in Salt Lake City, Saturday November 5, 2016.
Reyes was honored for his contribution to anti-trafficking. Stopping human trafficking has been a priority of Reyes’ time in office and he participated in scores of meetings on the issue, many of them involving organizations that — like Ballard’s Operation Underground Railroad — were focused on child trafficking. Throughout the five-year period, Reyes had calendar invites to meetings with a slew of anti-trafficking organizations; including DoTERRA’s anti-trafficking foundation; Jaco Booyens, a former White House anti-trafficking official, who Reyes arranged to speak at a staffwide event for the attorney general’s office; and representatives of Slave2Nothing, an anti-trafficking foundation formed by the In ‘N’ Out burger chain.
And in August 2023, the calendar invites show, Reyes had a meeting scheduled with Candace Rivera, founder of Exitus, which was billed as an anti-trafficking organization. A month after the meeting, Rivera was arrested and charged — by attorneys in Reyes’ office — with 28 counts of fraud, theft and forgery for misrepresenting herself and her organization . “That meeting never happened,” Crooks told The Tribune.
He said that The Attorney General’s Association had considered having Rivera speak about trafficking and Reyes, aware of the investigation into her practices, advised them not to invite her “because he knew what was going down.” Rivera wanted a call with Reyes to ask why and it was put on his schedule, Crooks said, but Reyes’ chief of staff told her that his boss could not take the call. Last month, Rivera struck a plea deal in which she pleaded no contest to nine charges and was sentenced to up to 15 years in prison.
Additionally, the calendars show a slew of speeches, panels and interviews where Reyes discusses the trafficking issue, as well as working group and task force meetings. World travel and meeting with foreign officials (Ebrahim Noroozi | AP) Players stand for their national anthems ahead of the World Cup group B soccer match between England and The United States, at the Al Bayt Stadium in Al Khor, Qatar, Friday, Nov. 25, 2022.
Reyes has regularly devoted portions of his public bandwidth since 2019 to cultivating ties with foreign dignitaries, alongside several publicized trips to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, the Mexican border and the nation’s capital. A Tribune investigation in late 2023 and early 2024 found that Reyes’ political campaign had paid for extensive travel and more than 30 stints at high-end resorts in Mexico, Europe and across the United States, including two Texas trips to shoot feral hogs from a helicopter. Entries from his calendar from 2019 to 2023 reveal additional travel, often related to his involvement in national professional groups and advocacy on issues such as human trafficking and opioid abuse.
It also shows glimpses of Reyes developing relationships among an array of well-placed global diplomats and political and government officials, some with seemingly tenuous ties to the Beehive State. Through Utah’s commerce-promoting World Trade Center, records show Reyes was set to meet and lunch in 2019 in Salt Lake City with a delegation including His Excellency Sheikh Meshal Bin Hamad Al-Thani, Qatar’s U.S.
ambassador. The calendar invites show the two sporadically in touch by phone or in person in 2020 and in 2021, when Reyes attended a panel discussion on human trafficking and sporting events held at Stanford University with a dozen top-ranked Qatari government, legal, business and human rights officials. Reyes then traveled to Qatar over Thanksgiving 2022 — with airfare and lodging paid by the Qatari government, including a ticket to attend a World Cup soccer match between the U.
S. and England. At the time, Crooks said the trip was not part of his official duties but instead related to Reyes’ assistance to the country in preventing human trafficking surrounding the global sporting event.
Reyes’ calendar shows him welcoming a Romanian delegation to the Utah Capitol’s Gold Room in late 2021, for another discussion on human trafficking, this one led by Lady Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, a British politician and member of the House of Lords with diplomatic ties to Romania. A year later, the calendar invites indicate Romania’s ambassador to the U.S.
, Dan-Andrei Muraru, visited Utah and met with Reyes for another talk on human trafficking, this time as it related to adoptions. The meeting also appeared to involve Betts, from Utah’s Silicon Slopes, and Clark Ivory, a prominent Utah housing developer who served a mission in Romania for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Records indicate a top executive with the Utah-based online retailer once known as Overstock, now called Beyond, helped arrange a personal meeting in 2019 between Reyes and the Honorable Dr.
Timothy Harris, then prime minister of the Caribbean nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. In 2021, Reyes was scheduled to host a delegation from Peru that included a range of city mayors and members of the South American country’s Congress, along with its former President Manuel Merino de Lama. (Congreso de la República del Perú via Flickr) Peru First Vice President Manuel Merino de Lama in 2011.
The Utah attorney general made arrangements to take the Peruvian delegation, including Merino de Lama, to visit a Murray company called VirTRA, the maker of a shooting simulator that the attorney general’s office purchased to train police. Later that same year, Reyes was scheduled to give a tour of the Utah Capitol to senior members of the Royal Thai Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Manat Chavanaprayoon, and a small group of family members, Thai military attaches and diplomats. That group also visited the simulated shooting range, the invites indicate.
Building a personal brand (Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes attends the Black Desert Championship PGA Tour golf tournament in Ivins, Friday, Oct. 11, 2024. But it wasn’t just delegates and diplomats that Reyes made appointments to take to the VirTRA simulation.
One calendar entry from March 21, 2023, shows an entry titled “virtra w DJ Irie,” seemingly in reference to the performer who is the official DJ for the Miami Heat. Reyes’ approach to his position frequently has him rubbing elbows with filmmakers, athletes and other entertainment industry leaders — often in the realm of human trafficking and opioid awareness. According to his calendar invites, in 2019 he was in Chicago filming “Addiction Unplugged,” a 10-episode docuseries that “humanizes mental health” and addiction.
Reyes is the show’s host and narrator, according to the now-defunct show website and Reyes’ personal website . He later had a series of calls with Stu Goffman, the executive producer, and several television interviews promoting the program. In March of that year, an item on Reyes’ calendar is logged as, “Filming w Sam Brower for new Movie.
” Brower is a producer on the show “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey,” the 2022 docuseries about Warren Jeffs, a leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — a polygamous offshoot of the mainstream Utah-based faith. Reyes didn’t appear in the film, according to the website IMDB, but Crooks said he was invited because attorneys in the office had previously prosecuted Jeffs. While Jeffs’ Utah convictions were later overturned, he was convicted in Texas of child sexual assault.
There were other calls and meetings with various producers and directors, like a 2019 call with producer and director Gil Medina, who directed “Vengeance,” a film about an undercover cop starring Danny Trejo and 50 Cent; a meeting Reyes requested with Brian Finn, director of “Resilience and the Last Spike” because Reyes couldn’t attend the premiere of the film about a girl separated from her family in the Utah desert; a call in 2022 with representatives of the Discovery Channel about a potential four-part docuseries; and a 2022 meeting with Dallas Jenkins, the director of “The Chosen” and Brad Pelo, a producer on the project, followed by a ceremony honoring the two. Organizations like the United Nations Civil Society and the United Institute of Peace also invited Reyes to speak on panels or give keynote addresses. In 2019, the Children’s Truth Gala invited him to be the keynote speaker and talk specifically about Operation Underground Railroad, according to the event description.
Each appearance contributed to Reyes’ brand as a “global expert” in human trafficking and “the undeniable leader at the state level against Utah’s epic battle with the opioid epidemic,” according to his own website ..
