A political action committee tied to Sen. Mike Lee’s political network jumped into a local Utah school board race last week with attack mailers and texts loaded with culture-war claims—and an embarrassing typo: it misspelled the candidate’s name.
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Liberty Champions PAC is targeting Stacy Bateman in the Aspen Peaks School Board race and pushing her opponent, Steve Sparti.
The apparent link between the PAC and this local race is Dan Hauser—Lee’s former senior adviser—who left the Senate payroll last year. Public records show Hauser lives in Alpine within the Aspen Peaks School District, though not in the area where voters are choosing between Bateman and Sparti.
Liberty Champions’ late-entry attacks hit familiar conservative talking points: critical race theory, pride flags, transgender athletes, and property taxes. The mailers urge voters to choose Sparti.
When asked about the attack ads, Thomas Datwyler, the PAC’s treasurer, initially denied involvement, claiming the address on the mailers “is not associated with us at all.”
Hours later, Liberty Champions filed state paperwork listing Datwyler as its primary officer.
Datwyler also serves as treasurer for Lee’s campaign, his leadership PAC, and a joint fundraising committee that raises money for the Utah Republican Party, and he appears as treasurer on the Utah GOP’s federal filings.
Liberty Champions sat out federal races entirely during the 2024 election cycle. Federal Election Commission filings show its spending went to administrative costs.
Most of that money went to L4 Consulting LLC, a company incorporated in Wyoming in 2022. Liberty Champions paid L4 $33,500 in 2023 for “PAC strategy consulting.”
L4 has no website or social media presence, and searches tie it to a Cedar City address used by a law firm that helps set up LLCs and corporations. Multiple out-of-state registrations trace back to that address.
Despite the opacity, L4 Consulting is headed up by Hauser. On his LinkedIn profile, he lists himself as L4’s president and names Liberty Champions as a client. Separately, he served as a senior adviser to Lee from September 2023 to July 2024, earning $93,958.21, according to Senate disclosures.
Since 2023, L4 has taken in nearly $300,000 for consulting from a handful of groups. About two-thirds came from the Constitutional Conservatives super PAC, which also lists Datwyler as treasurer. In 2024, that PAC spent more than $450,000 supporting Colby Jenkins’ unsuccessful primary challenge to Republican Rep. Celeste Maloy. Lee endorsed and campaigned for Jenkins during the race.
FEC disclosures also show L4 has also received just over $82,000 from Lee’s campaign and his affiliated leadership PAC.
Hauser did not respond to questions about his involvement with the Liberty Champions mailers.
When Datwyler was informed of the apparent connections between Liberty Champions, Hauser and the Aspen Peaks School Board race, he said he had not spoken to Hauser recently.
“Interesting. I honestly don’t know,” Datwyler said in an email. “I will call him and see!”
Datwyler did not respond to follow-up questions about why he was unaware of Liberty Champions’ activities when first contacted.
Utah places few restrictions on how PACs message voters, but ads that “expressly advocate” for or against a candidate must say who paid for them and whether a candidate or committee authorized them. The texts and mailers disclose they were paid for by Liberty Champions, but do not state whether they were authorized by a candidate.
The day after the Liberty Champions text, Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz also sent a text blast endorsing Sparti. It also did not say whether Sparti authorized it.
Schultz and Datwyler did not respond when asked why those disclosures were omitted.
Bateman criticized the last-minute attacks as a “smear campaign.”
“The fact that they spelled my name incorrectly is indicative of the amount of research they put into finding facts. This propaganda is unacceptable-our students are not pawns in a political game. The response from the majority of community members has been that smear campaigns have no place in Lehi,” Bateman said in an email.
Sparti did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s not clear what impact, if any, these last-minute hits will have. Bateman led the August primary election with 42.5% to Sparti’s 28.3%.
During the 2022 U.S. Senate race, Liberty Champions’ largest donor was Timothy Mellon, the heir to the Mellon banking dynasty, who gave $500,000n. Mellon is behind the “anonymous” $130 million donation that President Donald Trump said would be used to pay troops during the shutdown.
The New York Times reports that Mellon’s self-published 2015 autobiography contained “several incendiary passages about race,” including calling social safety net programs “slavery redux.”
An investigation by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) discovered documents in the trial of Sam Bankman Fried that appeared to link the convicted crypto fraudster to a $100,000 donation to Liberty Champions funneled through a nonprofit organization to help boost Lee during the 2022 election.
