The All Things Possible ministry, founded by Colorado Republican gubernatorial nominee Victor Marx, funded sheriff’s detective positions and surveillance equipment in two Florida counties through private donations that flowed outside any procurement process or public vote, according to memorandums of understanding obtained by the Guardian and published Thursday.

The MOUs were signed with the Leon and Wakulla county sheriff’s offices in September 2025, ten months before Marx narrowly won Colorado’s July 9 Republican gubernatorial primary. A Leon county sheriff’s office budget amendment attached to the county commission’s January 27, 2026, agenda records $210,000 arriving at the department. The Wakulla agreement commits the ministry to a detective’s salary and benefits “not to exceed $132,050.36 a year.” Both MOUs run three years and require the participating sheriff’s offices to “make a reasonable effort to obtain the required funding pursuant to the three-year schedule outlined above, particularly as PCI-TF funding phases out.” Leon’s schedule funds the post at 100 percent in each of the three years, through September 14, 2028. Asked about the post-expiration arrangement, Geneva Stokely, a Wakulla sheriff’s office spokesperson, said the MOU “does not establish what will occur with the position following the conclusion or discontinuation of PCI-TF funding.”

The arrangement has drawn scrutiny from Elizabeth Joh, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who has written on private influence over policing for two decades. Joh said she had never encountered such an arrangement. “To whom are these dedicated sworn officers accountable?” she asked. Even where a donor sets no formal conditions, she said, “the nature of the funding implies that straying from the donor’s expectations would threaten current and future funding.”

The Leon agreement itemizes what the money buys: salary and benefits for an internet crimes against children detective at $114,689.90 a year, training for seven detectives and supervisors, a $35,000 vehicle, an Intel Talion forensic workstation at $23,712, and a dedicated internet line at $1,200 a month. Spending on licences for GrayKey and Cellebrite — two commercial tools used to extract data from locked phones — is listed as “To Be Determined.” In neighboring Wakulla county, the ministry funds an entire detective post. The agreement itemizes a $30,000 Equinox, a Dell desktop at $3,509.11, a vest at $1,500, a Class A uniform with duty gear at $820, a filing cabinet, a desk, a desk chair and the detective’s firearms: a handgun at $481 and a rifle at $1,737. Colonel Chuck Whaley of the Wakulla county sheriff’s office reportedly said the arrangement came at no cost to taxpayers.

The taskforce named in the MOUs is described in those documents as “a 501(c)(3) nonprofit” that “operates in accordance with all applicable federal and state laws and under its nonprofit charter.” Asked whether it is a separate legal entity from the ministry, Yandall said: “PCI-TF is not a separate nonprofit and does not have a separate EIN.” The Guardian reported it could not find a separate entity of that name registered anywhere in the United States, and that the URL victormarx.com/pci redirects to atpministries.org/pci. All Things Possible is not named as a party to either agreement.

At least one sheriff’s office is still operating under the assumption that PCI-TF is independent. Stokely wrote: “The MOU identifies the Protecting Children’s Innocence Task Force as the entity providing funding to the Wakulla County Sheriff’s Office. The MOU identifies PCI-TF as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit but does not identify the sources of PCI-TF’s funding. WCSO does not have information identifying the sources of PCI-TF’s funding.” Gainesville police chief Nelson Moya, whose department announced its own partnership with the taskforce on September 18, 2025 — seven weeks before the Tallahassee launch — wrote: “I am not aware of who funds the ministry or PCI.” Moya said the taskforce gave his department a server valued at $223,733.14 and that, because it arrived as a donation, “it did not go through the city procurement process.” The MOUs also give the ministry a say in how the operations it funds are staffed: both require the sheriff’s office to “designate an Assigned Person, following her/his approval by the PCI-TF GEB” — a government executive board on which each participating agency holds a single vote and which meets quarterly. The Wakulla agreement provides that the officer is “to be selected collaboratively by PCI-TF and Wakulla County Sheriff’s Office” and will “be evaluated at regular intervals based on performance standards that are both established and maintained by the GEB in collaboration with PCI-TF.”

Wakulla sheriff’s office detectives were assigned to PCI-TF, the task force named in the MOUs, before the public launch. In early October 2025 — four weeks before the Tallahassee announcement — detectives in the criminal investigations division at the Wakulla sheriff’s office “who are assigned to the Protecting Children’s Innocence Task Force (PCI-TF)” completed the arrest of nine registered sexual offenders and one sexual predator in an operation called Not-a-Fan, according to a statement issued under the sheriff’s office’s own byline. Eight of the 10, it said, were arrested “by authority of arrest warrants obtained by PCI-TF Detectives.” Both the ministry and Jericho reject that description. Yandall said PCI-TF “does not prepare, apply for, or obtain arrest warrants,” and that warrants, arrests and other enforcement decisions rest with the agencies and the courts. Jericho said taskforce personnel had not participated in preparing or obtaining warrants in live criminal cases, applied to judges for them, or served them. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s own account of the same operation, published October 14, 2025, lists the same 10 defendants and the same charges but does not mention the taskforce, naming only FDLE, the sheriff’s office, Homeland Security Investigations and the state attorney’s office. Homeland Security Intelligence told the Guardian the taskforce was no longer active, and that: “Any financial contributions or equipment provided by the non-governmental organization in the form of a grant to support task force operations are managed exclusively between those organizations and the respective state or local law enforcement agencies. HSI is not a party to those arrangements, and its participation remains strictly focused on the federal law enforcement mission.”

The overlap between Marx’s ministry, his campaign and the taskforce runs through one person. Harry William “Buddy” Jericho, 49, a resident of Dunedin, Florida, has been a constant companion in Marx’s anti-trafficking work. Marx’s 2024 memoir “The Dangerous Gentleman” describes that work; the Guardian describes Marx’s anti-trafficking work as spiritually inflected. The book devotes extended passages to a close friend, “Buddy,” who is never given a surname. “Buddy is on my board of directors,” Marx writes, “and he is considered perhaps the best interrogator of terrorists our country has had in recent decades,” adding that “Buddy has performed more than three thousand interrogations for United States military and civilian law enforcement agencies.”

According to tax and electoral filings, Jericho has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars as Marx’s campaign manager, as a paid director of ATP, as the director of the initiative funneling money to police, and as chief executive of an intelligence company the charity paid more than $100,000 in a single year. Jericho said the roles were “not all held simultaneously in the manner your question suggests,” that ATP payments were for serving as a 1099 contractor rather than for his unpaid board seat, and that payments to Indago Technologies — where he is founder, CEO and shareholder — went to the company, not to him personally. Jericho has been on the board of ATP since 2020 and a paid member since 2023, according to tax filings. He signed the Wakulla MOU as the taskforce’s “Director & Board member” on September 17, 2025, and is the named contact on the Leon agreement that commenced on September 15. Asked why his contact address on both MOUs is on the Marx campaign’s domain, he wrote: “I maintain several professional email accounts and receive correspondence across them. I do not recall why I used the campaign-domain address in that particular instance, and I will not invent an explanation years after the fact. The use of that email address did not mean the campaign was involved in the underlying ATP matter.”

On LinkedIn, Jericho claims separate stints in the U.S. Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency. An Army spokesperson, Heather J. Hagan, confirmed in an email that Jericho was an enlisted intelligence analyst in the regular army from May 1996 to January 2005, with several deployments to southwest Asia between February 1997 and October 2004, and that he left as a staff sergeant. Enlisted soldiers are not officers. Hagan listed no combat or valor decorations and no deployment to Bosnia. Jericho said the Army account was “generally accurate” and that confusion arose from biographies combining his army service with a later civilian career at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he said he worked from about 2005 to the end of 2011 in an operations officer role. “The word ‘officer’ in that context refers to my civilian intelligence position,” he said. “I was not claiming that I had been a commissioned military intelligence officer.”

ATP, founded in 2003, set out its overseas missions in Marx’s memoir, recounting that he assembled “a paramilitary security team” of “experienced former CIA guys, Marines, Navy Seals, and Delta guys” and led it into Iraq and Syria during the war against Islamic State. According to the memoir, his teams bought “military-grade vehicles, ammunition, guns” and kept “an armory of weapons” at a base of operations. On the Iraq-Syria border, a member of his security detail asked permission to shoot a man who was watching them, and, on his own account, Marx replied: “Do it.” The operation, he wrote, was paid for by “Americans who gave money to support this sort of craziness.” He has repeatedly given his anti-trafficking work a supernatural cast, telling a TPUSA-affiliated podcast in 2023, “I hunt pedophiles, but I also hunt demons.”

In 2025, a slide deck published to ATP’s website announced a pivot from overseas rescue missions to close partnerships with domestic law enforcement agencies. The new initiative, called the Protecting Children’s Innocence Task Force, was to pursue sponsorship deals “funded by ATP’s high net worth donors” to procure surveillance equipment and software for local, state and federal agencies. The deck, whose metadata indicates it was created on March 5, 2025, said the taskforce would “redirect overseas efforts to support U.S. law enforcement in improving arrest rates.” An organization chart names Jericho as director. Jericho told the Guardian that some early organizational documents contemplated models under which personnel might obtain appropriate status through a cooperating law-enforcement agency, that it was “an early concept while the organization was being developed,” and that the taskforce “ultimately pivoted away from that model.” Yandall said no one acts as a sworn officer, auxiliary officer or special deputy on the taskforce’s behalf.

The Florida operation was not the ministry’s first attempt to put volunteers alongside police. Skull Games — weekend events at which volunteers were handed police cold cases and told to identify traffickers and their victims — began as an ATP project run in partnership with Echo Analytics, a company Jericho founded. A presentation obtained by the Guardian, produced by Jericho’s company in October 2022, describes volunteers as “Special Forces intelligence operators or those equally qualified” who crowdsource open-source material into “lead packets on trafficked victims, missing kids, and persons of interest,” and who may “proactively search escort-ads.” When The Intercept examined the operation in July 2023, it reported the use of sock-puppet accounts and commercial surveillance tools including face recognition, and events powered by the Israeli surveillance firm Cobwebs Technologies, which Facebook banned in 2021 in what the company described as a crackdown on “surveillance for hire.” Running Skull Games was Jeff Tiegs, then ATP’s chief operating officer, who was compensated $116,000 a year, according to its tax filings. The U.S. Army confirmed to the Guardian that Tiegs served as an infantryman from April 1987 to April 1995 and as a Special Forces officer from May 1997 to October 2015, deploying six times to Iraq and once to Afghanistan, and left as a lieutenant colonel with a Silver Star. The two organizations formally separated in 2023. ATP’s return for that year records a $70,000 grant to Skull Games, described as support for outreach to at-risk people — almost a fifth of everything the new charity raised that year.

Since the public launch, the taskforce has been named as a participating agency in a series of north Florida operations that have produced dozens of arrests, several of them alongside federal agencies. Operation Safe Harvest in March, which produced 20 arrests, was credited in media reports to the Tallahassee police department, the Leon county sheriff’s office, FDLE, the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, the U.S. Marshals Service — and the ministry’s programme.

None of the Florida money has yet appeared in an ATP tax return. The payments fall in the 2025 financial year, and that return is not due until November 15, 2026 — twelve days after Colorado’s gubernatorial election.

Marx won the July 9 Republican gubernatorial primary; during the campaign he said, according to the Guardian, that he had been forced to commit murder at age seven by his stepfather, refused to say how many people he may have killed as an adult, said he had called in U.S. airstrikes as a civilian, and boasted of performing exorcisms over the phone. Marx was known as Vaughn Victor Kennedy when he served as a U.S. Marine in the 1980s, according to posted images of service records he produced under questioning earlier in his campaign. On a website dedicated to rebutting “public claims” about his earlier life, the candidate says he changed his previous last name — the one shared with the stepfather he accuses of forcing him to commit murder at age seven — “after reconciling with his birth-father, Karl Marx,” who, on Marx’s earlier account, had spent time as a “practicing warlock.”