Colorado’s Republican governor nominee linked to controversial anti-sex-trafficking ministry

And its founder is the man who wants to be Colorado’s next governor.

Victor Marx, the Republican gubernatorial nominee and until his campaign commenced last October was chair and president of ATP. Since then, his ministry and his political organization have overlapped. The man running Marx’s campaign, former US army intelligence operative Harry “Buddy” Jericho, has also been central to ATP’s effort to operationally merge its raid-and-rescue ministry with law enforcement agencies in Florida.

The ministry’s website says it exists to set sex-trafficked women and children free “Spiritually, Emotionally, & Physically” – work it says since 2003 has taken it to some of “the most menacing places on earth” including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Nigeria and the West Bank. According to Marx’s 2024 memoir, rescue missions have often involved assembling paramilitary teams in foreign countries.

Since 2021, the ministry has increasingly run a domestic model, first with “Skull Games” events that “Special Forces (SF) intelligence operators or those equally qualified work alone or in teams” to crowdsource intelligence on alleged victims and offenders to pass on to police, and now by directly funding out of state 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 and volunteer manpower to police, and as chief executive of an intelligence company the charity paid more than $100,000 in a single year.

As governor, Marx would have authority over Colorado’s large state police force. In Florida, his charity is already running a controversial model of how policing can be paid for: private donations from anonymous benefactors fund officer salaries and surveillance equipment outside any procurement process or public vote.

Elizabeth Joh, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who has written on private influence over policing for two decades, 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.” What she wanted to know was what measures the Florida agencies had put in place “to assure that private wishes don’t influence public choices”.

The Guardian contacted Marx and Jericho for comment. Only Jericho responded. ATP’s chief executive, Chaz Yandall, answered separately on the ministry’s behalf. A subsequent email attributed to “The All Things Possible Team” said: “We wanted to clarify that All Things Possible Ministries is a completely separate organization from the Victor Marx 2026 campaign.”

Victor, son of Karl

Marx narrowly won the 9 July Republican gubernatorial primary in Colorado despite a campaign that saw him telling unverified stories about being forced to commit murder at 7 years old by an abusive stepfather, his refusal to say how many people he may have killed as an adult, his claim to have called in US airstrikes as a civilian, and his boasts of performing exorcisms over the phone.

Marx was known as Vaughn Victor Kennedy when he served as a US 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 (shared with the allegedly murder-inducing stepfather) “after reconciling with his birth-father, Karl Marx”, who on Marx’s earlier account had spent time as a “practicing warlock”.

Victor Marx set out ATP’s overseas missions in The Dangerous Gentleman, his self-published 2024 memoir. He recounts assembling “a paramilitary security team” of “experienced former CIA guys, Marines, Navy Seals, and Delta guys” and leading it into Iraq and Syria during the war against Islamic State.

According to Marx, 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 whole operation, he wrote, was paid for by “Americans who gave money to support this sort of craziness”, and twice he states that the ministry never took US government money.

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.”

Taskforce

In 2025, however, a slide deck published to ATP’s website announced that the ministry would pivot from overseas rescue missions to close partnerships with domestic law enforcement agencies, with initial plans for ministry members to act as sworn officers. It would also pursue sponsorship deals “funded by ATP’s high net worth donors” which would procure surveillance equipment and software for local, state and federal agencies. The new initiative was to be called the Protecting Children’s Innocence taskforce (PCI-TF).

The deck, whose metadata indicates it was created on 5 March 2025, says that following internal discussions “ATP redirected overseas efforts to support U.S. law enforcement in improving arrest rates,” beginning with “a thinktank with experts, including legislative allies … to strategize U.S. child sexual abuse efforts”.

But the scope went well beyond a thinktank. “Task Force mem