We have nothing to add to this South Dakota Searchlight article, other than our profound loathing of child pornography.
Court documents outline cause of shuttered child porn investigation of T. Denny Sanford
By John HultNearly four years ago, detectives in South Dakota launched an investigation to determine if the state’s richest man had shared or received child pornography through email.
One year ago, then-Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg issued a statement declaring that T. Denny Sanford had committed “no prosecutable offenses within the district of South Dakota.”
On Thursday, after two failed attempts by Sanford at the South Dakota Supreme Court to shield the information that sparked law enforcement scrutiny, the court records outlining the cause of the investigation were finally released to the public.
Those records lay out the discovery of emailed, illicit pornographic imagery that led to the launch of the investigation into the man who founded First Premier Bank and later became South Dakota’s most well-known philanthropist.
Documents follow Supreme Court loss
The release of the five documents prepared by Jeff Kollars of the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) came 22 days after the state Supreme Court ruled that Sanford would not be allowed to review them for redaction and ordered them released.
Stacy Hegge, Sanford’s attorney, sent a statement decrying their release in the absence of additional information from law enforcement, including evidence of hacking and proof that multiple people had “documented access” to Mr. Sanford’s electronic devices. She said the release only serves to sully her client’s good name.
“While some claim releasing affidavits that reiterate these allegations constitute transparency, releasing preliminary allegations made prior to completing the full investigation only misinforms people and obscures the investigation’s conclusions that no prosecutable offense occurred,” Hegge wrote.
Details on how law enforcement decided that no crimes had occurred or on the source of any “hacking” have not been released. On Thursday, DCI spokesman Tony Mangan reiterated that the agency opted against charging Sanford. At the time of the investigation, current Attorney General Marty Jackley served as Sanford’s defense attorney.
“In 2022, after Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was impeached and suspended, his administration issued a statement that it did not find probable cause for criminal charges in the state of South Dakota,” Mangan wrote.
Cybertip leads to investigation
The first of the five documents was filed on Dec. 9, 2019. In it, DCI Agent Kollars requested a search warrant for data connected to an AOL email account Kollars said likely belonged to Sanford.
That August, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children alerted the DCI’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force that an AOL user account contained images of child pornography. Kollars reviewed the tip and found 36 images, discovered on July 9, 2019.
There were “three separate unique images, repeated several times,” showing nude female children between 8 and 15 years old.
The name associated with the AOL account was Denny Sanford, the document says.
In September of that year, the Brookings County State’s Attorney asked for account information from a Verizon phone associated with the images. A call to First Premier Bank led Kollars to learn that the phone was used by Sanford, the owner of the company.
That same day, Jackley, then in private practice, reached out to Kollars to tell him that Sanford “anticipates cooperating with law enforcement, but requested that all further communications go through” Jackley.
The remaining four court documents repeat much of the information contained in the first, with additional details discovered after the DCI received information from the AOL accounts. Each was signed on March 12, 2020, and sought information from Verizon Wireless and Midco.
Kollars had discovered several emails containing photographs, again sent more than once, from a Verizon Samsung Galaxy smartphone in May and June. The smartphone in question, Kollars wrote, “is currently being used by Denny Sanford.”
The documents also note that the IP addresses used to access the email account “have possible subscriber geolocations that include locations in several different states.”
For that reason, Kollars wrote, “I am unable to make an accurate determination regarding the location of the individual who was accessing and using the email account” on the dates in question.
Similar uncertainty surrounded the geolocations of other emails, possibly tied to “locations in Arizona, Oregon and California.”
Sanford owns homes in Sioux Falls, Scottsdale, Arizona and La Jolla, California, Kollars wrote, but “I also know that it is possible that a user could be remotely accessing computers in those locations from anywhere in the world …”
By the time he wrote the four March documents, Kollars had also reviewed the email address to verify its connections to Sanford. That involved, among other connecting threads, the review of “a letter from the Dalai Lama to T. Denny Sanford thanking him for support for a University of California San Diego T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion,” dated in June of 2019. The email account also included messages with a photo of a hotel receipt that listed Sanford as a guest, photos of Sanford and photos of decorative windows from Sanford Hospital in Sioux Falls.
Revelation of investigation
The documents had been sealed as part of the open investigation, but a reporter for the Argus Leader had learned about and requested them. By the summer of 2020, that outlet and the nonprofit outlet ProPublica petitioned Minnehaha County Judge James Power to release the information in the documents, which he had signed.
Documents with details of open investigations are typically sealed in South Dakota until charges are filed, however. By October of 2020, ProPublica and the Argus Leader argued for the release of warrant information before Power.
Power ruled in favor of the media organizations, but Sanford appealed to the state Supreme Court, which heard arguments in summer of 2021 and ruled against Sanford that fall. That led to the release of the five search warrants themselves, but not the affidavits, which include written law enforcement testimony describing the reason for a warrant request.
Those would remain sealed until the investigation concluded, Power ruled. The media organizations confirmed that the investigation was over in late March of 2022, but Sanford again appealed their release.
The final set of oral arguments before the Supreme Court took place in March on the campus of South Dakota State University. The high court ruled against Sanford on April 5.
Chief Justice Steven Jensen wrote that “it is evident that the circuit court viewed Sanford’s most recent motion as a belated and unpersuasive effort to further delay the unsealing of the affidavits required by statute.”
This South Dakota Searchlight article is republished online under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Related post
Photo: South Dakota Supreme Court Justice Janine Kern gestures as she participates in oral arguments with other justices on March 23, 2023, in Brookings. (David Bordewyk/South Dakota Newspaper Association/ via South Dakota Searchlight).
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