Colorado GOP Nominee's Anti-Trafficking Ministry Funded Police Outside Public Oversight

Victor Marx, the Republican nominee for governor of Colorado, built and led a Christian anti-sex-trafficking ministry that has funded surveillance equipment and officer salaries for out-of-state law enforcement agencies, hired private intelligence contractors, and embedded itself within a network of self-styled rescue groups operating outside public procurement or oversight. Marx narrowly won the 9 July Republican gubernatorial primary and would, as governor, hold authority over Colorado's large state police force. The Guardian

Marx is the founder of All Things Possible (ATP), a ministry whose website says it has worked since 2003 to free sex-trafficked women and children in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Nigeria, and the West Bank. His 2024 memoir describes rescue missions that frequently involved assembling paramilitary teams in foreign countries. Marx is a former U.S. Marine. He served as ATP's chair and president until his gubernatorial campaign commenced in October. CBN News/Facebook

Since 2021, ATP has operated a domestic model. It began with "Skull Games" events, in which Special Forces intelligence operators crowdsource intelligence on alleged victims and offenders and pass the results to police. The model has since expanded to directly funding out-of-state law enforcement agencies. In Florida, ATP runs an arrangement in which private donations from anonymous benefactors fund officer salaries and surveillance equipment outside any procurement process or public vote. Marx's campaign manager, former U.S. Army intelligence operative Harry "Buddy" Jericho, has been central to ATP's effort to operationally merge its raid-and-rescue ministry with law enforcement agencies in that state.

Jericho occupies an unusually concentrated set of roles across Marx's political and charitable operations. He has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars simultaneously as Marx's campaign manager, as a paid director of ATP, as director of the initiative funneling money and volunteers to police, and as CEO of an intelligence company that the charity paid more than $100,000 in a single year. The convergence of campaign management, charitable governance, law-enforcement funding, and private intelligence contracting within a single individual's portfolio raises structural questions about the separation between Marx's political operation and the ministry he founded.

Elizabeth Joh, a law professor at UC Davis who has written on private influence over policing, said she had never encountered such a private funding arrangement for police and questioned to whom the dedicated sworn officers are accountable. That assessment from an academic specialist in the field frames the central tension: ATP's Florida model channels anonymous private money into sworn law-enforcement functions, bypassing the accountability mechanisms that typically govern police funding through appropriated budgets and elected oversight.

ATP's chief executive, Chaz Yandall, answered separately on the ministry's behalf when The Guardian contacted Marx and Jericho for comment. Only Jericho responded among the two men. An email attributed to "The All Things Possible Team" said ATP Ministries is a completely separate organization from the Victor Marx 2026 campaign. The statement of separation comes amid reporting that documents Jericho's overlapping roles across both entities and the intelligence company ATP retained.

During his campaign, Marx told unverified stories about being forced to commit murder at 7 years old by an abusive stepfather and refused to say how many. The claims have not been independently corroborated.

The broader context here is the intersection of three developments that would normally operate in separate spheres: a competitive gubernatorial race, a privately funded anti-trafficking apparatus embedded with law enforcement, and a single operative, Jericho, drawing income from the campaign, the charity, the police-funding initiative, and a contractor paid by the charity. Marx's potential authority over Colorado's state police force gives the Florida model a forward-looking dimension. If a governor whose founding ministry has already funded officer salaries and surveillance equipment elsewhere were to take office, the question is not whether the model could scale but whether the institutional firewalls that exist in Colorado between private charities and state law enforcement would hold under a governor with a record of merging the two.

The accountability gap Joh identifies is not hypothetical in Florida; it is operational. Anonymous donors fund sworn officers. A charity pays an intelligence company run by the same individual managing the political campaign of the charity's founder. Whether Colorado's governance structures would permit, resist, or simply not encounter a similar arrangement depends on choices and oversight mechanisms that Marx has not yet publicly addressed.