EXCLUSIVE: A constitutional sheriff led a campaign to take over a whole county—and won
Last November, a board meeting in Bonner County, Idaho went completely off the rails.
Instead of county business, officials spent the hour waging a heated war against one another.
Halfway through, the county comptroller spoke over Zoom, her voice harried.
“I’ve been thinking for quite some time about what I’m going to say,” she said. “My name has been slandered on social media, in the paper … I’ve just seen way too much over the last couple years. I’m tired of it. All of this, I’m sorry for my language, but this bullshit has to end. Enough is enough.”
Ostensibly at issue was an investigation into the possible abuse of funds at the county’s fairgrounds.
Lurking behind it all was a non-stop string of legal threats, personal grudges, official investigations, clandestine surveillance, and the death of one county official a year earlier.
Seated at the table, the three-member board of commissioners could barely look at each other as they lobbed their own threats.
“I am glad that I take up so much free rent in your head," Asia Williams, a county commissioner said, lambasting an attempt by the other board members to review her emails. “The precedent of this behavior is making our county look foolish. You can not like me all you want to but it is gonna be a long three years.”
Williams had recently obtained a protection order against another board member and was now escorted everywhere by a sheriff’s deputy. But a member of her protection detail had just been outed for filming the board's private sessions.
“We had no idea, for two months, we were being filmed,” chair Luke Omodt said in disbelief, adding, “I want to know as the chairman of the board of commissioners, what the heck is going on?”
An enraged citizen approached the board, shouting.
"You know what,” he said, jabbing his finger at the third commissioner, Steve Bradshaw, “The reason that deputy is here is because he threatened to shoot her.”
An exhausted Bradshaw leaned back and, with his hands behind his head, deemed the recording criminal.
“Does this constitute a Bonnergate?” he asked. “Because I'll find out by the end of the day?”
The man who helped throw the county into turmoil was not in the room that morning.
But Bonner County Sheriff Daryl Wheeler’s presence was everywhere. Wheeler identifies as a constitutional sheriff, a growing breed of law enforcement officials in America. He’s served in the county since 2008, repeatedly winning local elections.
Estimated to run around 300 departments in America, these police officers consider themselves the supreme authority in their land, answerable only to the Constitution.
And according to their beliefs, only they are allowed to interpret it.
Some scholars trace this movement back to frontier America when sheriffs played a vital role in guarding Western settlers’ expansion.
But in some jurisdictions, they’ve been linked to abuses of power. A cadre of sheriffs in several other states announced their refusal to enforce a new ATF gun law. One, in Michigan, ignored a red flag law.
Wheeler, the sheriff of a 47,000-person county nestled into the northern part of the state, wields power that critics say goes well beyond his job’s remit.
Wheeler did not respond to multiple detailed inquiries from the Daily Dot.
This story is based on over 7,000 pages of documents obtained from Bonner County via public records requests by the Daily Dot and multiple interviews with residents and county officials.
His detractors say he’s put his county in a financial stranglehold, attempting to block COVID relief funds while asserting himself as the ultimate arbiter of the county's budget. Along the way, he’s tussled with nearly everyone in the county government, trying to take control of servers from the commission, leaning on other law offices to investigate his detractors, accusing them of crimes, and spying on county officials.
A former county commissioner who sparred repeatedly with Wheeler accused him of running a shadow government.
And at the center of it all is six acres of land.
Darcey Smith worked as the director of the county’s fairgrounds, which lie at the northern edge of the city of Sandpoint in Bonner County. For nearly 100 years, the town has held a week-long fair celebrating agriculture, alongside rodeos, and demolition derbies.
South of the fairgrounds is six acres that often lay fallow. In 2021, Smith and the board proposed several community projects that would make the fair self-sustaining, including an ice rink and RV park.
Wheeler, however, had his heart set on building a new Justice Center to house a courthouse, alongside new prosecutor and public defender’s offices, as well as upgrades and expansions to the county’s jail and detention facilities.
He said in public meetings that these plans had been in the works for a decade, noting he pushed for a new jail in his first campaign for sheriff in 2008. The county board discussed building the Justice Center during a 2019 workshop.
But the project was deemed unfeasible by the county’s then-top commissioner.
“I started running budget numbers and it was gonna be $150 million,” Dan McDonald, who served as county board chair from 2020-2022, said in an interview with the Daily Dot. “We are a county of about 47,000 and there's just no way that the taxpayers would pay for it.”
While the short-term proposal to earn the town more cash wouldn’t have prevented any massive development down the road, the effort didn’t fly with Wheeler.
“I said listen, ‘We've got this ground here that we can lease you for a dollar a year and then you cut us in with a little stipend on the ticket prices,’” McDonald said in the interview with the Daily Dot. “The community gets this great ice rink. Everybody's happy. And then out of the blue, the sheriff goes crazy.”
When the board signed the agreement for the ice rink—upon the recommendation of Smith— Wheeler released a statement titled “Misappropriation of public property,” calling the ice rink a “shameless bread and circuses act” that would “defund the police.”
“The jail desperately needs repair and upgrading,” Wheeler said at a public meeting. He went over a list of deficiencies that included leaky roofs and limited bed space. “Instead, our current commissioners are giving away our public property for recreational purposes, I have a problem with that.”
His supporters rallied, emailing the commissioners.
“Skating rink vs public safety? Give me a break! Are we in far-left Democrat Portland or Bonner County, Idaho?” wrote one.
“The Sheriff budget has not been touched and the claim that we are defunding the police is a flat out lie,” McDonald responded.
Wheeler’s political allies helped push the cause.
They workshopped complaints with the Sheriff’s Office to send to the Idaho attorney general, harangued Idaho Parks and Rec staff to refuse grants for the land, and released a statement questioning if it was legal.
It didn’t help that the fair board is staffed with some of the most influential members of Bonner County society. Wheeler’s son-in-law, Scott Bauer, served as its legal counsel.
Bauer is engaged in his own claims against Bonner and its officials, threatening torts and lawsuits.
During the development drama, Bauer allegedly tried to redefine Smith’s role downward, attempting to move her under his supervision and acting in an “intimidating manner,” according to a grievance statement Smith filed with McDonald that was later leaked to the press.
She wrote Bauer pushed her to hold a secret meeting and questioned the fair’s charter, asserting that the county board had no authority over it.
Emails reviewed by the Daily Dot bear this out.
“I have to say I feel uncomfortable scheduling this … without the [county board] knowledge,” Smith wrote to Bauer about a secretive meeting during which he attempted to usurp the board’s authority over the fair. “I would be happy to reschedule this when they are at least made aware of this.”
“You work for the Fairboard, not the BOCC [Bonner Board of County Commissioners],” Bauer responded, in what appeared to be an effort to block the fair from building the ice rink.
“Seems odd,” Smith said in the grievance statement, “that in the middle of what most perceive to be some type of ‘land war’ between the [commissioners] and the Sheriff that the Sheriff’s son-in-law all of a sudden takes a bizarre interest in the Fairboard and Fairgrounds … All in a very manipulative and intimidating manner.”
Bauer declined to answer a number of questions from the Daily Dot, saying the county exerted attorney-client privilege over his legal advice to the fair board and Smith.
He added, "I did not try to intimidate Ms. Smith, ever. None of Ms. Smith's accusations have any merit."
Smith’s grievance memo ended on a note of foreboding. Bauer was trying to “embarrass and shame” her.
“I fear retaliation and continued harassment.”
At the same time as Smith battled the sheriff over the land, she was targeted by accusations of embezzling fairgrounds funds.
The county prosecutor assigned Bauer to open an internal investigation, based on tips the prosecutor received.
The prosecutor also referred Smith to Sandpoint Police. Smith denied all allegations when questioned.
She wrote in texts to McDonald, “I am angry, I am confused. I didn’t do what they are accusing me of.”
The basis given to launch the investigation cited a belt buckle invoice that was allegedly faked and gas certificates cashed by Smith’s daughter and her friends. A later investigation pinned the claim on an invoice for a pair of boots.
In an interview, Kristina Nicholas Anderson, a friend of Smith’s, described a campaign of intimidation that began after the sheriff started agitating against the ice rink. “[The sheriff] would park some of his deputies outside her office door and just stay there,” Anderson said. “She really felt like they were trying to get her to leave.”
Four days after being questioned by Sandpoint Police, Smith drove to the fairgrounds and died of a gunshot wound.
Within days, the coroner ruled it a suicide. The Sandpoint Police agreed with the findings in its report.
But the part of the community at odds with Wheeler refused to believe the official narrative.
According to the police report, Smith drove to the fairgrounds alone on Halloween morning, her vehicle spotted by a security camera.
Just four minutes after parking in a wooded area, police say she shot herself in the forehead with her own gun, holding it with her left hand and pulling the trigger with her thumb.
But, as her friend Anderson noted, she was right-handed.
Her keys, purse, and wallet were found discarded in a line on the ground outside the car. She was only wearing one shoe and one glove.
Police cited a journal entry of hers the day before where she said she was depressed.
In the report, they say her shoe fell off as she walked, she dropped things from her purse while pulling out her handgun, and took off her glove to access the trigger.
However, locals saw inconsistencies in the report that merited further investigation on their part.
Two separate Facebook groups, "Bonner County Public Record Requests Results" and "Documents for Darcey" both launched, requesting public records on Wheeler’s activities and Smith’s death.
They obtained crime scene photos, 911 calls, Smith’s journal entry, and the fairground budget.
A cottage industry of independent journalists tore through the documents
At the center of their belief is a certainty Smith wasn’t the type of person who would commit suicide.
Her Facebook page, full of remembrances from friends and family, describes her as a lively person with a wacky sense of humor.
“The woman who could make anything fun,” a friend wrote.
J.D. Leighty, a vocal critic of Wheeler ever since a close friend was killed during a confrontation with Wheeler’s deputies, pointed to anomalies he thought were in the official report.
“Her shoe came off and the insole popped out as if she was running from something,” he said.
Leighty, who is a veteran, also pointed to the fact that her semi-automatic gun was found with its slide locked.
“You can't have a loaded magazine fully seated in your handgun, shoot yourself, and then have the slide locked to the rear while there's still bullets in the magazine. That's impossible. That has to be physically done by a person.”
“As I'm reading through them, I'm like, ‘wait a minute,’” he said. “What they're describing here is impossible.”
Skeptics were also frustrated an autopsy wasn’t performed.
“Because she was outside and because the projectile was retained, an autopsy should have been performed,” Dr. C. R. DiAngelo, a member of the National Association of Medical Examiners, said to the Daily Dot.
The coroner’s report pointing to “depression” as her motive also said that she noted in her journal that her “books were bad,” looping in the embezzlement accusations.
But that phrase was never uttered, a misinterpretation by the coroner in his conclusion about her suicide. A supplement to the police report later noted investigators incorrectly cited the diary entry.
They revealed she wrote not that her books were bad but that she had “fluctuating #’s.” Smith, a diabetic, was referring to her glucose levels.
“The information from the journal entry does not change my opinion," the detective wrote after the mistake was discovered.
“The list of ‘how the hells’ in this entire death are long and growing,” one person wrote in the Bonner County Public Record Requests Results.
People’s questions around the circumstances of Smith’s death worked their way back to Wheeler, who demanded on Facebook that they stop speculating while announcing the embezzlement investigation.
“The recent unfortunate death of the Fair Director does not impact the search for the truth and the investigation will continue,” he said.
“Why the F would you post this? There are family members that have enough to deal with right now,” a commenter said. “You just threw that match on this fire! Way to go!”
Smith’s husband of 20 years, now widowed with two kids, wrote an impassioned post filled with grief and rage. “So let me get this correct: the three TOP law enforcement officials in Bonner County are afraid of a few threats and accusations. Grow thicker skin boys and man up.”
“Once you ring that bell, you can’t unring it,” McDonald said. “Knowing the woman herself, I still doubt that she ever took a penny,”
Wheeler went on a crusade against anyone criticizing his or Bauer’s role. He heard from the founder of Redoubt News, a right-wing site that supports him, that McDonald had been speaking about the pressure Smith felt.
Wheeler filed a complaint against McDonald with county HR.
“There has been lively FaceBook discussions about Darcey Smith's suicide, to include
people criticising me and Scott Bauer for bullying Darcey to the point of taking her own life.,” he said, escalating his complaint to a criminal referral for libel to the Idaho Attorney General.
“I had the investigator from the AG's office along with the deputy AG in my house about a month after I left office,” McDonald said. “Wheeler’s claim was fabricated and bogus and I was able to quickly disprove [them].”
After Smith’s death, the prosecutor commissioned external agency Resolve Investigations to take over the fraud investigation. The choice raised eyebrows in the community because the chief investigator had once been a Bonner County Sheriff’s deputy. Its final report was released in July 2023, touted by Wheeler and the prosecutor as proof of Smith’s guilt.
It listed six sums they accused Smith of embezzling, totaling $40,358.22. She may have embezzled another $206,956.44, the report said.
But the firm fell short of making the case in many people’s eyes. It did not release the supporting records. It made assumptions about what 2022 revenue should be based on prior years, even though each year varied. It went with assertions from fair board members about which purchases were “unauthorized”—but members wildly disagreed with one another. Smith was accused of stealing money used to hire part-time help off the books—but according to the police interview of office staff, these hires did indeed occur.
Neither of the original accusations, the belt buckle and the gas cards, were addressed in the report.
“The report read as if it was a junior high project,” a citizen wrote to the Sheriff’s Office, calling it a set of “unproven random loose facts.” It was torn apart by the community online.
Months later, any hope for a fuller investigation was lost because the fair board no longer had the financial records. “Now we are told there are no records…” a person noted at a board meeting in December 2023. “I believe that the prosecuting attorney’s office and the sheriff need to issue an apology as big and bold as the accusation they made against [Smith].”
No such apologies were forthcoming. Instead, a blame game ensued.
“I do think it is important for the BOCC and other electeds not to pin it on the fair board,” Bonner County’s prosecutor wrote to Wheeler in a private email, referring to the missing funds.
Which is exactly how it went down. With Smith dead, both the prosecutor and Wheeler pinned the blame on county officials.
Wheeler’s support in the community stems from many convergent factors
Bonner County, nestled in the Idaho panhandle, is also known as “Cop Land” and “Blue Heaven,” a refuge for law enforcement officials fleeing the anti-police ethos of more liberal western states.
Wheeler himself is part of the great cop migration, a transplant from the Bay Area.
Northern Idaho is also the center of the American Redoubt: a migration movement of survivalist Christian conservatives.
Its media organ, Redoubt News, is one of Wheeler’s political allies. It runs down his opponents, supports his pet projects, and publishes op-eds by Wheeler and his wife.
And the growing Christian nationalist movement in the state has adopted law enforcement as its shepherd.
At a public meeting Wheeler held at a church, the pastor announced, “We are fans of constitutional sheriffs.”
“Our Father, we are grateful for the men and women you have put in authority over us,” he prayed.
Then, an act of God helped supercharge everything. When COVID-19 hit, constitutional sheriffs leaped at the opportunity to assert authority.
At the height of the pandemic, constitutional sheriffs refused to enforce mask mandates and lockdown orders, deeming them unconstitutional.
Wheeler was one of the most vocal. In April 2020, he wrote an open letter to Idaho’s governor saying it was time to “reinstate our Constitution” because COVID-19 is “nothing like the Plague.”
That episode was part of a tendency from Wheeler to rely on iffy information about the pandemic. He cited a Florida businessman who emailed his senator about his belief the media and globalists loyal to then-President Barack Obama created “this incredible—yet completely baseless fear" over COVID to harm President Donald Trump.
The uncompromising stand raised his political capital in a community awash in fears of COVID overreach.
After the Biden administration passed a COVID package that would send millions in aid to Bonner, Wheeler used his political clout to turn people against the funds, claiming they were tied to mandatory vaccination.
“I’ll tell you what my blood’s boiling again,” he said at a meeting. “I just want you to know, as your sheriff ... if anyone comes knocking at your door and says roll up your sleeves, please call the Sheriff’s Office, we will come to your house, and we will remove that person.”
He got a standing ovation.
In October 2021, he returned almost $20,000 set aside for his office, the first Idaho sheriff to do so, saying the funds came with “strings attached.”
“I will not follow [...] executive orders of President Joe Biden!” Wheeler wrote.
His defiance radicalized the citizenry, who attended board meetings in early 2022 and demanded the commissioners refuse all federal COVID aid.
“Our freedom is not for sale!” a woman said. “Totalitarian rules violate human rights!”
The resistance kept the stimulus money in limbo.
The directors of the county’s emergency services and waterworks made public pleas, highlighting how the money could provide critical infrastructure.
Wheeler’s resistance was built on another inaccurate foundation.
Emails reviewed by the Daily Dot show that Wheeler put his trust in a blog post from “Crack Newz.” The article, written by “Blarp Blog,” falsely stated that accepting COVID stimulus funds would “require full compliance with Biden vax mandates.”
The prosecutor’s office rejected this notion.
But as the county finally moved to accept the funds, Wheeler threw up new roadblocks.
He formed the Individual County Constitutional Officers Committee (ICCO) and asserted only it could decide when funds would be available. He appointed himself head of the subcommittee that would control the process. He also put an outsider who would later become his most vocal champion on the board: Asia Williams.
McDonald, then chair of the county board, dismissed the ICCO as Wheeler’s attempt to set up a shadow government.
“I don’t recognize any perceived authority you have given yourself,” he wrote to Wheeler, calling it a “frivolous effort.”
By Idaho statute, the audit of the county’s finances is under the purview of the commissioners.
Dismissed by McDonald, Wheeler claimed he was ceasing his efforts.
But, in the next board term, in the wake of the fairgrounds fraud investigation, Wheeler repeatedly tried to revive ICCO to control auditing, only to be shot down by county officials. Even so, in a December 2023 meeting, Omodt pointed out that Wheeler’s ICCO continued as a secretive unit within the county government.
“Somehow the ICCO came up with this idea that they had the authority to create an audit committee,” he said, calling it a “long convoluted exercise of overreach.”
But that wasn’t the only attempt by Wheeler to maintain power in the community.
Wheeler strongly rejected efforts by the board to set up a unified IT department and instead attempted to take the county’s technology under his control.
McDonald said that during his term, the county hired a new CIO to improve its systems, who stress-tested computer security across the county government.
Wheeler vehemently blocked these efforts, McDonald said.
“[The CIO] gets an email from the sheriff saying, ‘if you go down this road, I will arrest ... you for hacking into the Sheriff's Office,’” McDonald recounted.
At issue was the sheriff’s 911 center, which had its own IT department. It grew, over time into a full-fledged, parallel system.
According to a recording of an April 2023 meeting obtained by the Daily Dot, the sheriff’s allies tried to increase its scope. Bauer, Wheeler’s son-in-law, helped steer the fair board under the sheriff’s IT purview, presenting it as legal advice from the prosecutor’s office.
When Omodt, the new county commissioner, continued the process of upgrading the county’s IT, Wheeler refused access to the courthouse basement where his servers were located.
“Permanent access to this location will never be granted to you or to county IT staff,” he wrote back.
According to a letter from Omodt, Wheeler and his allies, the prosecutor and the coroner, refused to attend technology briefings—and then were surprised by changes in early 2024 that reduced the privileges of the “law side.”
They threatened litigation against the county with a cease-and-desist letter, demanding that the privileges be restored. The letter was leaked to Redoubt News, which called for the arrest of “this usurper” Omodt.
Meanwhile, the community wondered what the sheriff was hiding.
One person asked if he was trying to protect his “secret ICCO servers.”
Amid the fights, a Wheeler’s ally joined the board, going up against his opposition.
Williams, endorsed by Wheeler’s daughter, won a set in 2023.
Emails reviewed by the Daily Dot show a regular flow of communications between Wheeler to Williams, complaining about the other commissioners.
Even before Williams had been sworn in, Wheeler forwarded her a transcript of a board meeting, complaining that the commissioners violated open meetings law. It is unclear what the transcript showed.
Since joining, she’s run interference for Wheeler. She berated and filibustered other commissioners in board meetings. She once brought her own microphone to a meeting to speak over them.
When a county employee informed Williams that he heard another commissioner, Bradshaw, say he wanted to shoot her, Williams obtained the protection order against him.
“He has been on a warpath,” she said.
Bradshaw denied he had meant to threaten her, calling it a “lie from the pits of hell.”
But, the restraining order allowed Wheeler’s deputies to reach further into board meetings.
In November, a deputy from this detail was found recording the board’s private meetings.
”It was revealed today in executive session that LT Riffel has been recording the proceedings within the BOCC office and during executive sessions,” Omodt wrote to the top officials of the county, “...without the permission or knowledge of the BOCC. ... I am appalled.”
Wheeler said the deputies were running their cameras as part of the protection order in case anything happened to Williams.
“Commissioners Omodt and Bradshaw threw hissy fits like little school girls,” Redoubt News reported.
But now, Wheeler won’t need to act in secret. Last November’s election eliminated any resistance in the county.
Bradshaw challenged Wheeler for the sheriff and lost. He has been replaced by Brian Domke, a weapons instructor associated with the American Redoubt.
Omodt lost his primary in May to Ron Korn, the founder of a branch of the Three Percenters, an anti-government militia.
Meanwhile, Wheeler, who was first elected in 2008, will start another term as sheriff in January 2025.
What will become of the fairgrounds, with his allies in place, is unknown
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