Wake up Utah Media ... Elected Officials ... and Others ... Wake Up!

I have spent the better part of this year and many more years doing your job for you. (See HERE and HERE.)

I did it because someone had to, and because for decades I have been immersed in this kind of work — as an FBI Special Agent 1970-76, as a criminal investigator for the Utah Attorney General, and as a retired U.S. Army Special Forces, Green Beret, intelligence officer. I’ve spent several careers learning to read structure, conmen, and grifting around schemes that they had arranged hoping the authorities would not notice. I know a captured, conflicted, and corrupted system when I see one. I have assembled the record, sourced every line of this most recent example, and delivered it, in writing, to nearly every Main Stream Media (MSM) newsroom in this state.

And you did nothing. You opened it, and you did nothing.

So let me be plain, in the way an old man and great grandfather with nothing left to lose can afford to be right up front and in your faces. Right now, in Utah, the mainstream press looks — to me, in my studied, historical perspective, and opinion, formed over sixty years of watching the MSM … it is —

You are scrambling, nearly all of you, to protect your access to the corporate and political masters you are supposed to be covering, confronting, and exposing.

You know the scene.

Dorothy’s three companions — the Scarecrow with no brain, the Tin Man with no heart, the Lion with no nerve — trembling before a bellowing curtain, certain they cannot face what stands behind it. That is Utah’s press corps, frozen in the doorway of every story that truly matters.

But here is the part the newsrooms forget: the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion each found the very thing they thought they lacked — and marched anyway. If you had only half a brain, a little more heart, and a lot more courage, you would already have “passed” this Wizard of Oz test. Utah’s press fails it daily, cowering when it is time to march — with purpose and confidence, head-to-head, eye-to-eye, issue-by-issue, time after time, unrelentingly — against those who subvert the rule of law and good governance in Utah.

Brain. Heart. Courage. Find yours.

Not at all of you. There are still real journalists in this state — the ones kicked to the curb, or set to writing puff pieces and obituaries, or the eager cubs standing in the gate like thoroughbreds, chomping at the bit to run. This is not written against them. It is written to shame the men and women who hold their reins too tightly for other “purposes.”

This is not a rumor I am floating. It is a body of primary-record evidence — recorded votes, an executed development agreement, a campaign-finance filing, a line in a federal ledger — assembled under a discipline I have kept my whole working life: separate what a document proves from what it merely suggests, cite a source for every fact, assert no motive, and treat a high suspicion score not as a verdict but as a reason to look harder.

I delivered it to KSL, to the Deseret News, to the Salt Lake Tribune.

I delivered it to the State Auditor. I delivered a Notice to nearly the entire Legislature. I delivered a draft to the United States Department of Justice and to a federal Inspector General. I offered to brief anyone who asked — by courier, by sworn affidavit, by secure transfer, with chain of custody. I’d even leave it on a stump in the forest.

No Utah newsroom has requested a briefing, the underlying data, or any correspondence. (Two named subjects of the reporting have replied personally; not one newsroom has.)

Each delivery is time-stamped and certified by a third-party service, so there is no question the material reached you. It reached you.

I can even tell you that inboxes across those newsrooms and that Utah Capitol registered opens and clicks within minutes of my sends — on one Notice, nearly the whole Legislature inside twelve minutes.

Here is the irony that ought to shame every editor in the state: the men I named have answered. President of the Senate Adams and Senator Brammer have responded to me personally after I lit a fire under them about HB260 that in essence tried to close the courthouse doors to all but lawyers. The subjects of the reporting engaged. The reporters did not. When the people you're investigating will talk to you but the press won't, something is upside down.

No story. No correction. No rebuttal. No request for the underlying data. No reporter on the phone. And — tellingly — not one officeholder or company named in these reports has sued me for a syllable, sentence, or publication of it, though the correction door has stood open the whole time. I would have expected the lawsuit. It has not come. Make of that what you will; I only ask that you notice it.

I could reach for my old-soldier’s vocabulary here. Fifty years in uniform and an FBI badge gave me a rich and fulsome bucket of blazing words for men who won’t do their duty, and it would peel the paint off these walls. I’ll spare your sensitive ears. I’ll use the politest word that still tells the truth about Utah’s MSM, its insiders, its electeds, and its anointed ones because they are ...

All bark once, maybe — then the teeth come out and the growl turns to a whimper at the first sign of the men who sign the checks.

Here is what you were recently handed — the anchor facts only. I am not asking you to take my word. Every one of these points to a public record you can pull yourself, and the companion memo at the end walks you to each door.

In 2026, House Bill 507 stripped ordinary Utah counties and cities of the power to grant local tax incentives to the largest data centers, effective May 2027, and reserved that power to state authorities named in the code. One of the authorities is the Military Installation Development Authority — MIDA — chaired by President of the Senate Adams. Then, on April 24, 2026, with that Senate President in the chair, the MIDA board approved a forty-thousand-acre data-center empire called Stratos — unanimously, in open session — on a thirty-year agreement that set the project’s energy tax at one-half of one percent of a possible six. The ordinary doors swing shut; the authority door stays open; and the man at the head of its table holds the key. That is not a secret. It is on the state’s own public-notice website. Any cub reporter in the building could have read the minutes.

Seven days after that approval, five contributors tied to MIDA’s project areas gave one hundred thirty-five thousand dollars to Senate President Adams Leadership PAC on a single day — part of a hundred and sixty-four thousand that day. One of those five is a sitting board member of a MIDA infrastructure district. Now hear me carefully, because this is where a careless writer would overreach and I will not: those donors are tied to MIDA’s other project areas, not to Stratos; the Stratos developer gave that PAC nothing on the record; and I claim no bargain, no coordination, no quid pro quo. I claim only this — the arrangement is exactly the kind a reasonable citizen is entitled to question, and not one of you asked the question. The United States Supreme Court, in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal, held that the probability of bias is itself the problem, bargain or no bargain. You did not have to prove a crime. You had to make only a phone call.

Three legislative sessions running, three bills, each sold as reform, each leaving the public able to see far less of its officials’ finances than the year before — a summary in place of a detailed form, forty companies bundled under one label, a nested company allowed to vanish from view. They passed all but unanimously and were signed into law in daylight. The vote sheets are public. Nobody covered the starvation diet at the end.

Utah’s Executive Office crammed more than a hundred and twenty-seven million dollars of federal pandemic relief into a single category labeled only “Multiple Recipients,” at one Capitol address — and a hundred and four million of it in grants whose recipients are never named, while every other category in the same federal data names its recipients individually. Oh … by-the-way … Governor Cox’s office managed/controlled those funds.

A federal Inspector General has already flagged Utah as a high-risk grantee. The data sits on a federal portal. It went uncovered but it’s all HERE and Justice4All reported it to you and much more to include how Governor Cox’s office controlled and used the Executive Office of the State of Utah ~$900 million fund HERE. But … is this how such “stuff” lands and sits on your desks?

Four stories. Every one of them documented. Every one of them delivered to you. Every one of them still sitting there.

As shown above, the Governor’s office administered roughly $900 million in discretionary pandemic relief. Inside that pool sat the single line item you saw above, reported to the federal pandemic-oversight portal under one Capitol Complex address and labeled only ‘Multiple Recipients’ — $104.0 million whose individual recipients are never named. Every category in the same spreadsheet portal is the same. You would be surprised about who/what is named in that data. How do I know? I’ve seen it and so have many of you in my reports.

The data underneath all of these details can only be seen or obtained via Utah’s Government Records Access Management Act (GRAMA).

GRAMA … no thanks to recent legislation … is now a toothless program that has been called a “Black Hole“ by The Society of Professional Journalists. Fortunately, before ravaging GRAMA, the data underlying the blue font entry was obtained in detail.

I don’t think you are stupid. I think you are conflicted, and I think the conflict is structural. Two of the three newsrooms I named — KSL and the Deseret News — are actually owned by a corporation held by the state’s dominant church. This is a church whose influence is woven inextricably into and intertwined with the very “heart strings” of a majority of Utah’s electeds and Utah’s newsrooms. There exist many reports that could be used to speak truth to the powers who may “miss step” the rule of law and good governance in Utah. But “no” for the most part, that type of journalism is far too often left to languish in limbo. The foregoing is a matter of public corporate record, not an accusation about anyone’s faith or religious preference.

The third, the Tribune, has spent years fighting for its life through a joint operating agreement and changes of ownership that would make any editor cautious about whom he (or she in this case) offends. The Tribune board chairman’s company is tied to the State of Utah via multi million dollar contracts. Cox’s Executive Office of the State of Utah is also on record with this company to the tune of approximately $7.6 million. Hmm?? How does one … on one hand … go about capturing the media and on the other hand grease the wheel with the government? Is that relationship cozy enough? Is someone being held hostage here? Or … is this a mutual admiration and advantage relationship? Go figure that one out! We have already. And you have our exposé which you answered and acknowledged with the usual “crickets.”

I understand caution. I have simply run out of patience with servile procrastination.

When the people who sign checks are entangled with the people the story would expose and name, the story gets softened, or shortened to a single blurb, or quietly never assigned. The Utah Media may go “head to head” with power for one news cycle, if at all, and then will often move quickly on to the next word-bite. They seldom if ever dive into the weeds, where the real quarry lives, for the weeks and months and years an investigation actually takes. That is the difference between hacking at the branches and striking at the root.

And here is the part that ought to sting the most. Newsrooms that open every document I send and print nothing are not idle — they are covering themselves. They have proven, by their own inboxes, that they saw the evidence, and left themselves room to say later that the story never warranted the ink. Silence, once you've read the record, is a choice. That is inoculation — a newsroom vaccinating itself against its own silence.

Great Grandfather here says that this spanking is not for you. You know who you are. You are the reporter with the itch, the editor who still remembers why he or she took the job, the cub who has not yet learned to flinch.

So here is my advice. Connect the dots from the past to the present. Project your powers, your methods, and your voice into something that matters. Be an agent for change. Tell truth to power at every opportunity you are given — and if you are not given the opportunity, make it … seize it.

To the owners and editors who hold the reins too tightly: I have made this as easy as it can be made. The evidence is assembled. The sources are cited. The companion memo below walks any reader to every document without a single link to break. There is nothing left for you to do but the thing you were built to do. Publish it, chase it, or explain your silence — because your silence is now itself a matter of public record, and I have written it down … memorialized it.

I am eighty-nine years old. I have endured a great deal worse over the years than a mere hostile owner and/or editor could dish out. So … have at me … bring it on!

I did not spend sixty years learning to read a captured system so my work could die on a shelf while your credentialed press studied its own shoes or counted the angels on the head of a pin over coffee with your masters. The law is supposed to apply to your handlers, masters, legislators, and governors too. Prove me wrong about you. I would be delighted to be wrong.

Every figure in this letter is drawn from a public record, and the companion Confirmation Memo gives you a written pathway — a set of arrows — from the front page of each public system to the exact document. No links to rot; just directions. You do not have to trust me. You can confirm me, or correct me.

THE ONE DOOR

le.utah.gov → 2026 → HB507 → Status/Votes; then utah.gov’s Public Notice Website → MIDA → the April 24, 2026 minutes and board packet.

THE CHECKS

disclosures.utah.gov → Adams Leadership PAC → 2026 → the May 1 contributions.

THE DISCLOSURE DIET

le.utah.gov → the 2024, 2025, and 2026 sessions → the three disclosure bills → their roll-call sheets.

THE UNNAMED MILLIONS

pandemicoversight.gov → Utah → prime recipient “Executive Office of the State of Utah” → the “Multiple Recipients” line.

THE FULL RECORD

The complete, sourced Confirmation Memo — every figure with its pathway — is posted with this letter HERE. The longstanding investigative archive is at justice4eternity.substack.com and justice4all.blog.

Former FBI Special Agent (Graduate of the FBI’s Command School of Advanced Criminology) · former Special Agent, Utah Attorney General’s Office · retired Major, U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Beret) · U.S. Air Force veteran, 5,000+ flight hours, listed on the federal Ionizing Radiation Registry · 100% service-disabled veteran · retired Utah secondary educator · credentialed investigative journalist, Society of Professional Journalists · B.S. English (Journalism minor), M.S. Administration of Justice.

Publisher — Justice4All (justice4all.blog) and Justice4Eternity (justice4eternity.substack.com).

Contact: wwickizer@gmail.com · 385-239-8326

Citizen, Reporter, Legislator, and others … if you are not part of the solution, you could likely be part of the problem. As the image below suggests, you are either roadkill or running a roundup of those doing the killing.