Back in late 2021, an improbable news release landed in my inbox. Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, it announced, had been named the National Football League’s “Man of the Year.”
The announcement was a head-scratcher because the NFL’s Man of the Year award is a very real thing. Named after Chicago Bears legend Walter Payton, it is given to the player who demonstrates excellence on and off the field.
I checked the stats and Reyes recorded zero catches, ran for zero yards, made zero tackles and was zero-for-zero on field goal attempts that year. Yet, there he was, mugging in Tweets — as he often does — wearing a Green Bay Packers jersey and holding a trophy with the NFL logo at an awards ceremony at Lambeau Field.
Reyes’ people later clarified, explaining that it was an award given to him by the National Child Identification Program, which isn’t affiliated with the NFL, but was founded by former Packer Kenny Hansmire.
The gist of the program is this: Parents get a little form where they can record information about their kid, including identifying characteristics, a fingerprint and a DNA sample (collected by having the child suck on the corner of the card). If their kid goes missing, parents can provide the information to police.
Reyes has been a huge advocate for the program. In 2020, he led a letter co-signed by 19 other Republican attorneys general to then-President Donald Trump asking for support to purchase enough cards to give to every child in the country.
He also helped get a grant allowing the state to acquire 58,000 of the cards to give to Utah kindergartners.
Then, in June of 2021, Reyes office shelled out nearly $1.8 million to purchase 652,000 of the cards, plus an additional 70,000 for each of the ensuing four years from the private for-profit company Hansmire founded.
It was a few months later that Reyes went to Green Bay to receive his trophy. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas Sen. Donna Campbell and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — who were instrumental in getting funding for the Texas ID program — were also given awards at the Packers game.
Then last year, his office worked with Sen. Kirk Cullimore to spend around $140,000 every year going forward to buy more of the cards for the parents of incoming kindergartners.
And, just so we’re clear, none of us want to see anyone’s child kidnapped. If the unthinkable happens, being able to provide law enforcement with necessary information makes sense.
But this week ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported that similar kits are available for free from nonprofit and governmental entities. And despite the company’s claims about the effectiveness of the cards, when the reporters contacted 15 major metropolitan police departments, they were unable to find an instance where the information had been used to help recover a child.
Hansmire, they found, has a trail of failed businesses, has millions of dollars in federal tax liens, twice pleaded guilty to felony theft and was sanctioned by Connecticut banking regulators for allegedly misleading investors.
The Utah attorney general’s office missed all that. In a March 2021 email, the staffer leading the project said she “did a thorough background sweep on everything, including people and affiliated organizations” and it all seemed to “check out.”
That aside, there is some weirdness with the Reyes’ push to bring the kits to Utah.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Robert Gehrke.
In Reyes’ 2020 letter to Trump, he said the kits cost $1.76 each. In the March 2021 email about the program, a staffer in Reyes’ office said that, because both Texas and Utah were ordering the kits, Utah could get 696,000 kits for about $790,000, or about $1.14 a kit. But in August of that year, when the contract was signed, Utah paid $1 million more for roughly the same number of kits.
It also appears that there is no viable plan to get them to the parents who might want them. Last October, Reyes’ office announced — and media outlets reported — that the kits were available at police and sheriff’s offices if parents wanted to pick them up.
The contract envisions the kits being sent to law enforcement and then distributed to schools. But several districts I contacted haven’t heard of them being passed out to students and one said nobody at the district knew they existed until I asked about them.
So presumably there are about 700,000 of these cards — minus however many parents got from police departments — and a contract in place to get another 70,000 for new, incoming kindergartners (about 19,000 more kits than the projected number of children that could be entering kindergarten), and no plan to get them where they might conceivably serve some purpose.
This whole thing is classic Reyes, who seemingly can’t resist the allure of a junket, a degree of quasi-celebrity and some pics for social media.
Remember Banjo, the Big Brother-style surveillance program he spent money on, only to have it fall apart after it was revealed the company’s founder — a pal of Sean’s — once had ties to a white supremacist group?
Or how he went to Colombia on a supposed human trafficking “sting” with Operation Underground Railroad.
Or how he appeared on the TV show “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch” to be briefed on paranormal phenomena and later moderated a FanX panel on the topic.
Or how he took a free trip to the World Cup, paid for by the government of Qatar.
And put on a black beanie to go undercover to uncover human trafficking at the Sundance Film Festival — only to find nothing.
Take the trip, flash the shaka hand sign, post the pic. It’s all great for Sean’s social media — and less great for Utah taxpayers who deserve an attorney general more focused on the job and less on purportedly being the NFL’s Man of the Year.
Correction: May 15, 2023, 11:20 a.m.• A previous version of this story referred to a reported investigation into the fundraising practices of Operation Underground Railroad. In the spring, the organization was notified it would not be prosecuted by the Davis County attorney’s office.
