News broke this week that Attorney General Marty Jackley named Brent Kempema as his second in command.  The article states that Kempema lead the investigation on Denny Sanford’s child pornography case, and Jackley said it’s Kempema’s “critical experience” that made Jackley decide to give him the job.

We noticed some interesting connections.  Marty Jackley represented Denny Sanford during the child pornography investigation the State of SD did after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children sent a tip about it in July of 2019.  Brent Kempema was the main prosecutor on behalf of the state of SD.  At the time of this case/investigation, Jason Ravnsborg was the SD attorney general.

It took two years to have the documents of the case unsealed.  You can read about what exactly was found here. If you want to read through a timeline of events, you can find that here.  Read more about how 36 images were found in Sanford’s email account and the excuses as to why the state chose to not move forward here. Here’s another one.

What drew our attention throughout some of these articles is what also caught the attention of a Democrat out of California who has a blog called Words and Deeds.  Their article was pretty informative because we learned Sanford is a big donor in more states than South Dakota to the tune of billions.  Regardless of how we’re on opposite sides of the aisle, they noticed what we noticed:

“This quote from 11/17/2021 on Dakota News Now – a broadcast effort by Fox, ABC, and NBC –  makes me wonder:

• South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg determined that there was enough evidence to charge Sanford in the case, but opted to defer to federal prosecutors because the case spanned across many states.

You might have heard of Ravnsborg in the recent past, because he was impeached and removed from office by South Dakota lawmakers following an incident where he killed a pedestrian while driving and using a phone at the same time. The former attorney general compounded his situation by lying to investigators and having a meeting with a Division of Criminal Investigation and a digital forensics expert.

Following Ravnsborg’s removal, Deputy Attorney General Brent Kempema submitted a notice of completed investigation that “determined that there are no prosecutable offenses within the jurisdiction of the State of South Dakota.”‘ (emphasis mine)

Isn’t that interesting? It seemed that Ravnsborg was going “full steam ahead” with this case, then he’s removed and *boom*, Kempema as the lead prosecutor for the state releases this statement saying there’s no prosecutorial offenses within the state of South Dakota and Jackley says it looks like Sanford’s emails were hacked?

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children seems to disagree and hopes the state stopped the investigation for the right reasons, one being that possibly because it became a federal case due to it spanning multiple states and not just being swept under the rug and forgotten, yet it seems any investigation hasn’t moved forward.

We’re told that government works through favors to each other.  Did favors happen within this scenario? Were they bought off or threatened by Sanford to stop investigating? Was Kempema promised a bigger role in the AG’s office by Jackley if he stopped the investigation (again, while Jackley was Sanford’s defense attorney and Kempema was the head prosecutor for the state against Sanford)? Would that mean that Jackley knew he’d win the AG race? (That opens a whole other can of worms concerning our elections…)  Lots of speculation here but either way, when a democrat from California and a republican from South Dakota both notice that something doesn’t smell right, it might be because it doesn’t, and it’s strange that two attorneys on opposite end of this case now work together as the top two attorneys for the state of SD.  Are we as tax payers comfortable with that?

P.S.  Other things we found that leave us going, “Hmmm….”

This shows that Noem’s biggest donor is Denny Sanford through Sanford Health with $105,584 as well as $56,650 from First Premier Bank (a bank Sanford owns). 

We also found this video back from 2015.  What are your thoughts?