“Fortunately for Utah, RAGA stood their ground, this time. Brown flew out to what he thought would be a crowning. Instead, he was turned around with a rejection.”
It has been revealed by multiple sources that exposed corruption involving Gov. Spencer Cox and his desired AG candidate pick Derek Brown - highlighted by TPM contributor Savanah Hernandez’s recent report – caused an endorsment to be denied from the Republican Attorneys General Association during a recent meeting in Florida.
Additionally, Utah Lt. Governor Deidre Henderson – who oversees certifying the AG election and routinely acts as a proxy for Cox, according to sources – chairs Brown’s Finance Committee on his campaign team and had made moves to potentially remove another AG candidate until TPM reached out for comment for this report over the matter.
Before Cox’s election engineering efforts, he expressed his support for a motion to fill the AG role in Utah by governor’s appointment; this idea was floated by Cox’s brother-in-law in the Utah legislature, Senator Mike McKell.
According to one of the whistleblowers, on Tuesday March 5, when TPM released its previous article about corruption and interference in the attorney general race, Brown, who Cox has pushed to be AG, a few hours later landed in Florida on a donor’s private jet to attend a summit meeting with the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA).
During the meeting, Brown was pressuring Reyes, who is the chairman of RAGA, to get the committee to endorse Brown in the Utah AG race, as TPM’s initial reporting suggested.
One source told TPM, “Unfortunately for Brown, some of the RAGA leadership had gotten a copy of the first article and pulled it up in the middle of their executive meeting and vetoed the motion to officially endorse Derek Brown.”
“The article played true that very same day,” one of the whistleblowers added. “Fortunately for Utah, RAGA stood their ground, this time. Brown flew out to what he thought would be a crowning. Instead, he was turned around with a rejection.”
Brown left the meeting dejected without the endorsement and came back to Utah just in time for the state caucuses, per a whistleblower.
It has also been revealed by the sources that Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, who recently glorified the roots of the communist revolution in Russia, then “received a complaint from one of Brown’s delegates” requesting that one of the other AG candidates in Utah, Trent Christensen, be expelled from the race over him not officially being licensed to practice law in Utah, yet. Christensen is currently licensed and in good standing in Massachusetts, which has a reciprocity agreement with Utah, so his authority to practice law in Utah only has to be cleared through some final formalities before he can practice in the Beehive State.
Per the whistleblowers, Henderson directly called and confronted Christensen to inform him of the investigation and how she was then expected to decide on whether or not to toss out his candidacy by Friday, March 15. Christensen refuted the validity of the complaint during the call.
“The one repeatedly doing the dirty work for Cox is our own Lieutenant Governor, who again should be a neutral third party but instead is chairing Derek Brown’s finance committee. It’s like making a team member ref their own game,” stated one of the sources.
An announcement of Brown’s finance committee staff released Dec. 19, 2023, confirms the chair position as being held by Henderson, potentially leading to a conflict of interests in her duty as Lieutenant Governor to supervise and certify the election.
“I’m incredibly honored to have so many talented and well-known Utahns publicly support my campaign,” Brown stated at the time of the release.
Additionally, after the release of TPM’s previous report on Cox’s office extorting Reyes to not run in the AG election, a joint release with all three other Utah AG candidates aside from Brown calling for a response to the claims was pushed to several local news outlets in Utah, none of which took the initiative to report on it. The statement is as follows:
“A Post Millennial article published on March 5, 2024, raises serious allegations regarding Governor Cox and Derek Brown coercing current Attorney General Sean Reyes to not seek re-election and to endorse Brown’s campaign. We, the three other Republican candidates for Attorney General, agree that the claims are very serious and should be investigated by an unbiased agency.”
The statement was signed by all three candidates, Trent Christensen, Frank Mylar, and Rachel Terry who herself had just received an endorsement from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Instead of covering the unified statement and the original claims, local Utah outlets took aim at Christensen’s candidacy, which is permitted under Utah statute as long as he is licensed to practice law in Utah by the time of the election, which he is expected to do.
Ultimately, after TPM reached out for comment Thursday evening for this report, Henderson‘s office decided that Christensen had the full legal standing to remain on the ballot, and consequently denied the objection to his candidacy.
Derek Brown, Lt. Gov. Henderson, and Gov. Spencer Cox were all reached out to for comment; none replied before the publication of this article.
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