The curtain fell on the World Cup with an epic final match between Argentina and France last week, with Argentina taking home the trophy on penalty kicks.
But questions remain surrounding the government of Qatar paying for two Utah officials — Attorney General Sean Reyes and Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, along with two of Adams’ grandchildren — to attend an early-tournament match between England and the United States.
The biggest one that readers have asked is: How is this legal?
Well, it’s legal because Qatar doesn’t have specific issues pending before either official and nothing in Utah law prohibits any public official from accepting travel paid for by a foreign government. State law prohibits lobbyists or companies from paying for travel or tickets to sporting events, but not foreign governments.
There was an attempt recently to at least shine some sunlight on these sorts of junkets during the most recent legislative session that got scuttled at the last minute.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Robert Gehrke.
State Rep. Candice Pierucci, R-Herriman, sponsored House Bill 90 last session that would have required lobbyists hired by foreign governments to register with the state — like all lobbyists have to do — and would have required elected officials who accept a gift, including travel, from a foreign government to disclose those perks annually.
“To me, that’s a huge issue of transparency because to me that’s a gift to an elected official and I wouldn’t be getting it were I not in this position,” Pierucci said at the hearing on the bill.
The bill had broad bipartisan support, with 61 of the 75 House members co-sponsoring the measure. It flew through the House with a unanimous vote but then got stalled for nearly six weeks in the Senate. Then, on the last night of the session, Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, stripped the disclosure requirement from the bill before it passed.
When the change went back over to the House, about an hour before the end of the session, Pierucci didn’t have much choice but to go along with it. It was, she said then “a much more incremental change” than she had wanted but it was “a compromise that was reached and I’ll continue working on this issue.”
Bramble told me Wednesday he doesn’t have a problem with disclosure if a foreign government pays for travel directly, but he was concerned that officials might get “tripped up” if a foundation or association that has received money from a foreign government pays for gifts or travel.
“We may not even know,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be a blind side.”
Pierucci said she’s working on a bill for the upcoming and hopefully it fares better this time.
To be clear, her original bill wouldn’t have banned such travel, no matter how lavish. It wouldn’t have prevented officials from going on international trade missions, whether they were paid for by the state or a foreign government.
It wouldn’t prevent elected officials from going to exotic locations for conferences — like the one in Reyes was at last week in Los Cabos, Mexico — even though, having covered some of these conferences, they typically involve some optional meetings in the morning and a fair amount of playing on the beach and schmoozing with lobbyists later in the day.
All the bill would have done is let voters know which foreign governments are providing officials with gifts — sometimes, as in the case of the World Cup junket, very lavish gifts.
The fact that there was any resistance at all to such a modest proposal should probably raise more questions about how common is this practice, because, let’s face it, nobody would have ever known Reyes and Adams took a trip on Qatar’s dime had I not happened to find out about it.
So how are we supposed to find out the next time?
Maybe we could file open records requests, but that doesn’t always work. Case in point: I filed a records request with Reyes’ office for anything mentioning Qatar or World Cup and got nothing back except a printout of a newsletter about the World Trade Center Utah’s trade mission to Qatar and an email about how to respond to a constituent upset that Reyes went to the World Cup.
There was nothing about an itinerary or meetings. Not a, “Hey, I’ll be out of the office. If you need me I’ll be at the World Cup.” Nothing about any of the consulting that Reyes had supposedly done with the Qatar government or past meetings he had supposedly had with officials from Qatar about human trafficking and cybersecurity.
And because the Legislature has inexplicably made official calendars exempt from disclosure, there was nothing to be had there, either. (Reyes’ office said the trip was arranged through the Attorney General Alliance, not his office.)
Finally, it is worth noting that, Qatar has not been shy about courting attorneys general in the past. Attorneys general from Nevada, Arizona, New York and Montana have all visited the country. And the former Florida attorney general, Pam Bondi, was paid $150,000 a month to lobby for Qatar after she left office.
Certainly, there are legitimate reasons for elected officials to travel abroad and there are situations where it is reasonable for a foreign government to pay for that travel. There is also the potential for foreign governments to offer up posh junkets and tickets to sporting events with a tenuous, if any, official activity or benefit to the state.
It’s up to us, as voters, to decide where that line is and the only way we can make that decision is if we know when and where those elected officials are going and which government is picking up the tab. In that context, disclosure is not a “gotcha” issue. It’s the bare minimum that should be required from people who are supposed to be working for us.
