Are “rogue” judges and justices placing their own personal feelings above settled law? That claim has been a staple of Republican and conservative accusations decrying an unfair playing field at the judicial level for well over a decade. But now the hotly contested issue is poised to take a jarring new turn in the Beehive State. A Utah Supreme Court justice is accused of having a sexually charged relationship with an attorney who argued a critical congressional redistricting case before the court.
“Utah's governor, Senate president and House speaker are launching an investigation into Supreme Court Justice Diana Hagen,” KSL-TV in Salt Lake City reported April 16. The complaint “came from a Provo-based attorney who said Hagen's ex-husband told him the justice had exchanged ‘inappropriate’ text messages with David Reymann, one of the attorneys involved in a case about redistricting, which led to Utah getting a new congressional map.”
My Special Friend the Plaintiff
Hagen’s ex-husband told an attorney that the justice and Reymann had sent text messages to each other that Tobin Hagen said began as ‘silly’ and then became ‘more suggestive,’” KSL relates.
The case Reymann participated in on behalf of the plaintiffs, League of Women Voters of Utah v. Utah State Legislature, “is arguably the highest-profile legal case to reach the Utah Supreme Court in years,” the station noted. “The justices issued a unanimous ruling in July 2024 saying lawmakers overreached by changing Proposition 4, an anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative.”
The decision erased a Republican-backed redistricting effort. It was a major victory for Democrats. Justice Diana Hagen wrote the majority opinion.
Hagen was appointed to the Court in March 2022 by Cox, a non-conservative Republican governor. That the lukewarm Cox is among state Republicans calling for a deeper investigation into Hagen reveals the extent of the partisan divide over the crucial 2024 redistricting ruling.
Utah’s Judicial Conduct Commission briefly looked into the matter before deciding against a detailed investigation, infuriating GOP officials.
“An initial review by the Judicial Conduct Commission and the Court left important questions unresolved. Allegations of this nature, especially involving public officials, must be examined with transparency and accountability to establish the facts and to maintain public confidence,” Cox, state Senate President J. Stuart Adams, and House Speaker Mike Schultz said in a joint statement.
“We will move forward with an independent investigation to ensure the facts are fully examined.”
Democrats and their big-box media allies in the state promptly lost no time in accusing Republicans of dirty play for airing the matter in public after the commission declined to investigate.
Utah Democrats, Media: You Don’t Have a Right to Know About This
“‘Very little credibility’: Claims against Supreme Court justice found to be ‘misleading’. Cox, GOP lawmakers investigating anyway,” read the headline to an April 17 “news” article in the notoriously leftist-biased Salt Lake Tribune, the state’s largest paper.
Not content with that opening narrative, The Tribune pivoted in a more aggressive direction two days later. “Did the Legislature break the law by disclosing complaint against Supreme Court justice?” read the headline to a loaded April 19 article once again published as “news.”
The article duly stressed Hagen’s defense of her relationship with Reymann. “Justice Hagen said in a sworn statement that she renewed a friendship with Reymann five months after Hagen wrote a unanimous opinion in the redistricting case. Since then, she recused herself in three cases involving Reymann that have come before the court,” the paper wrote.
It also took the unique tack of reporting on its own failed attempt at an open records request on the Hagen probe in a way that suggested releasing such information to the public is illegal:
“The Judicial Conduct Commission [on April 17 denied] an open records request by The Salt Lake Tribune. ‘The JCC disapproves of any unlawful release of records,’ Alex Peterson, the executive director of the commission, said in a letter explaining the denial […] Nonetheless, the file was provided to numerous news outlets [that] morning by the Utah House of Representatives in response to Government Records Access and Management Act requests after having been first sent to KSL in response to the outlet’s request.”
“It is a class B misdemeanor for anyone to release records that are classified as private under the law,” the paper ominously added.
We should not be allowed to have this information. What burning inquisitiveness on the part of these newshawks. They call this journalism in the dominant press.
The Tribune’s framing was in lock-step with Utah Democrats’ stance: Move along, people. Nothing to see here.
“We trust the work of the Judicial Conduct Commission and the process it followed as it previously investigated and addressed this matter,” Democrat state Senate and House leaders said in a statement. “Efforts by the Legislature to investigate a member of the judiciary raise significant concerns over the separation of powers. This is part of a broader pattern of overstepping judicial independence and sets an incredibly dangerous precedent.”
Utah Democrats are openly asserting that all aspects of a judicial apparatus that has proven so valuable to them are beyond the purview of the other branches of government. It is the same argument made by the satisfied party on the national level as individual judges such as US Circuit Court Judge James Boasberg in the District of Columbia and US Circuit Court Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts, make one sweeping ruling after another blocking Trump administration policies.
Whatever the truth of the disturbing allegations against Diana Hagen may be, to suggest that they should not even be seriously investigated introduces an ugly new aspect to the politicized judiciary debate currently taking place in this country. An additional question worth pondering is that if judges can decide that their personal opinions about cases before them override settled law, what’s to keep them from also believing that their personal behavior – no matter how compromising – is also above reproach?
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