Six months after a Teton County conservative activist handed out campaign checks on the Wyoming House floor — igniting a controversy that dominated the 2026 legislative session — Republican candidates officially accounted for those donations this week in campaign finance reports.
For several candidates, Tuesday’s campaign finance reports marked the first time they explicitly and publicly acknowledged receiving a check from Teton County donor Don Grasso. Several declined to confirm during the legislative session whether they had accepted a check, while others only acknowledged so much when they spoke under oath during a House Special Investigative Committee hearing spawned by the affair.
Rebecca Bextel, now a Constitution Party hopeful for governor, delivered the checks on behalf of Grasso, a businessman who recently retired to Jackson and said in February that the checks were intended for 10 Republican candidates. The incident, now known as “Checkgate,” sparked a House special investigation, legislative rule changes, an executive order from the governor and an ongoing criminal inquiry by the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office.
By publishing time, nine of the 10 named candidates reported receiving $1,500 checks from Grasso, including: House Speaker Chip Neiman of Hulett; Reps. John Bear of Gillette; Marlene Brady of Green River; Gary Brown of Cheyenne; Tony Locke of Casper; Darin McCann of Rock Springs; Joe Webb of Lyman; Sen. Bob Ide of Casper; and former lawmaker Mark Jennings of Sheridan.
Rep. Chris Knapp of Gillette, who was also named by Grasso in February, had not filed his campaign finance report by publishing time Wednesday, and did not respond to WyoFile’s request for comment.
All 10 are either members of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus or allies of the group of hard-line Republicans.
Under Wyoming’s campaign finance laws, candidates are not required to report either contributions or expenditures until seven days before the primary election. That deadline came Tuesday, though many candidates and candidate committees had yet to file as of Wednesday, according to the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office.
Rep. McCann, a freshman legislator, was first to confirm to a reporter in February, before the news broke, that Bextel had handed checks to him and several others on the House floor after lawmakers had adjourned for the evening on the session’s first day. A photograph, taken by Rep. Karlee Provenza, D-Laramie, showed the exchange between McCann and Bextel with Brady in the background holding her own check from Grasso.
“Rebecca has a lot of contacts that want to see a conservative Legislature, a real conservative Legislature, not a fake Legislature,” McCann said at the time.
Brady, also a freshman lawmaker, initially told a reporter “I can’t remember,” when asked what Bextel handed to her on the floor. Later that day, Brady said, “Well, figure it out,” when a reporter asked her who the Teton County donor was who wrote the check.
More senior legislators took more time to come forward.
“I’ve been very tight-lipped about how I was involved in this,” Speaker Neiman said in an emotional floor speech on Feb. 19 in which he described accepting a check from Bextel in his office a few feet from the House floor. By the time he revealed his own involvement, Neiman had already selected the members and chair of the committee tasked with investigating the checks.
When the committee held its first and only hearing on Feb. 26, Brady, Knapp, McCann and Webb were asked to testify. Each confirmed accepting a check on the floor and each denied any wrongdoing.
Other named lawmakers, including Bear, Brown, Neiman, Locke, Ide and Jennings, were not asked to appear before the panel because the scope of its investigation was limited to checks distributed on the House floor. At that point, Bear had told a reporter he accepted a check from Bextel, but not on the House floor.
“I don’t know about a check,” Jennings told a reporter Feb. 16. “I only heard rumors about that through the papers.”
Jennings received a $1,500 donation from Grasso on April 13, according to his campaign finance report. Other candidates listed a variety of dates in their filings, including Ide, who reported a $1,500 check from Grasso on May 27. Ide did not respond to WyoFile’s request for comment.
When first approached by a reporter at the Capitol in February, Bextel said “it’s nobody’s business” when asked what she’d given to lawmakers on the House floor. She later wrote in a Facebook post that she had “saved paper envelopes and [the] carbon footprint” by “delivering lawful campaign checks from Teton County donors when I am in Cheyenne.”
In text messages with Bear from January that she provided to the investigatory committee, Bextel told the lawmaker she would ask Lisa and Dave Meaney for campaign checks. According to campaign finance records filed this week, the couple donated over $22,000 to Freedom Caucus members and aligned candidates in addition to $15,000 to the group’s political action committee this election season.
Grasso wrote more campaign checks to Republican candidates after the Checkgate controversy had subsided, according to secretary of state records. In July, Grasso donated $1,500 each to Republican Rep. Kevin Campbell, R-Glenrock, and two GOP hopefuls: Roy Birt of Wheatland and James Corkery of Casper.
Birt is challenging Sen. Taft Love in Senate District 6 while Corkery is running for Senate District 27, which is currently represented by Sen. Bill Landen, who is retiring.
Fight Wyoming Fight, a political action committee formed in January, reported receiving $50,000 from a “Gonald Grasso” of Wisconsin. The committee did not respond to WyoFile’s voicemail and email asking if it was a misspelling or a different person. The committee lists Mark Petrie as its chairman and Charles Gantt as its treasurer in its records with the secretary of state’s office.
The PAC reported contributions from other regular Teton County Republican boosters, including Susan Gore, Nancy Donovan, and Karen and Jay Kemmerer. The PAC reported donating $290,000 to Megan Degenfelder’s gubernatorial campaign.
