A Non-Profit called InVest USA Sent a Cease and Desist to Silence Us. Our Answer: We’re Just Warming Up On Exposing Fraud.

Editor note: It's well-worth you reading the backstory about some of the accusations against Michael Letts and Karen Letts of InVestUSA, which can be found here.

On July 1, 2026, a lawyer in Chicago sent us a letter demanding that we go silent.

The letter, sent on behalf of Michael Letts, Karen Letts, and their charity InVest USA, demanded that Law Enforcement Today, The 1776 Project, Blue Lives Matter, and The Silent Partner Marketing immediately and permanently stop publishing anything about the Letts family or their organizations.

Not just stop publishing allegedly false statements. Stop publishing any statement about them at all. It demanded we delete every post. It demanded we publish a groveling public apology, in a form their lawyer would approve in advance. And it threatened us with “referral for criminal investigation” if we didn’t comply within seven days.

Their problems begin right on the first page: the letter’s threats were aimed at a company called “SPM Performance LLC.”

No such company exists in our world. Neither I nor any of my businesses have any knowledge of, or affiliation with, any entity by that name. The lawyer hired to threaten us into silence couldn’t even correctly identify the company he was threatening. As our attorneys put it, that failure was “merely the first in a series of glaring factual and legal failures” that render the letter a complete nullity. It would not be the last. And it gets JUICY.

Here is our answer, delivered by our attorneys at GrayRobinson on July 14 and now delivered to you, our readers, in plain English. The full The full letter can be found here. can be found here.

We will not be retracting anything. We will not be deleting anything. We will not be apologizing for telling the truth. And instead of dimming the lights, we’re turning up every single one of them.

Because here’s what the Letts family apparently doesn’t understand: when you send a threatening letter to the largest pro-police news outlet in America demanding silence about a charity that raises millions of dollars in the name of protecting cops, that’s not the end of the story. That is the story.

The Cease and Desist Was Built on a Claim That Is Flatly False

The centerpiece of the Skyles letter, the entire foundation of its “actual malice” theory, is this assertion: that “every claim previously asserted against Michael Letts, Karen Letts, InVest USA, and Broken Arrow Children’s Ranch” was “DISMISSED for failure to state a claim,” and that “a court of competent jurisdiction has already adjudicated the underlying allegations to be legally insufficient.”

That statement is false. Not arguably false. Not a matter of interpretation. False.

The litigation in question is The Silent Partner Marketing, LLC v. Invest to Protect Our Law Enforcement Officers, Inc., et al., Case No. 562025CA001960AXXXHC, pending right now in the Circuit Court of the Nineteenth Judicial Circuit in St. Lucie County, Florida. The public docket tells the real story:

We are the plaintiff. The Letts parties are the defendants, facing a 40-count civil fraud lawsuit.

The defendants filed a motion to dismiss based on jurisdiction. That motion remains pending. No hearing has been held. No order has been entered. Nothing has been dismissed. Not “every claim.” Not a single claim.

On July 1, 2026, the very day the cease-and-desist letter was sent, our response in opposition to that motion was filed with the court.

A defendant’s unheard motion to dismiss is not a court ruling. It is the opposite of one. And as our attorneys pointed out in their response, anyone (let alone a licensed attorney threatening litigation over these very matters) could have confirmed the actual status of the case by searching the St. Lucie County docket in a matter of minutes.

So the one “fact” the letter offered as proof that we’ve been publishing debunked allegations is itself a fabrication. Sit with that for a moment. A letter accusing us of “reckless disregard for the truth” was built on a representation about a court proceeding that a two-minute docket search would have destroyed.

Then Things Got Strange: The “Phoebe Trull” Operation

The cease-and-desist letter was emailed to me on July 7, 2026, at 3:25 p.m. As far as we know, at that moment only two parties on their side had possession of it: the attorney who sent it and his client.

That evening, something remarkable happened.

An individual identifying herself as “Phoebe Trull” began blasting the letter out to people in my professional orbit, emailing from Phoebe@TrullLegal.com, a domain that had been registered just 24 hours earlier. Eight different individuals that night. Two more the following morning. In total, at least twelve emails to ten different people in roughly 20 hours, every single one of whom, as our attorneys documented, had been personally introduced to Michael Letts by me during our business relationship.

And “Phoebe Trull” didn’t just forward the letter. Her emails falsely claimed the letter was enclosed “along with criminal charges for all partners, board members, employees, agents, officers, members, and any persons acting in concert with” us.

Let’s be clear about what that means. There are no criminal charges against me, my companies, or anyone associated with us. None. That claim was an outright fabrication, sent to my professional contacts under the banner of a “law firm” whose website and domain had existed for barely a day.

It gets worse. At least four of the recipients are active witnesses in our pending Florida lawsuit against the Letts parties. As our attorneys’ response states, weaponizing a legal demand letter to threaten witnesses in pending litigation with phantom “criminal charges” crosses the line into conduct implicating Florida’s criminal witness tampering statute, Fla. Stat. § 914.22.

So who is “Phoebe Trull”? The Chicago attorney who sent the cease and desist has represented in writing that he has no knowledge of her and that she is not associated with his firm. We take him at his word.

But that only sharpens the question. If the lawyer didn’t circulate his own letter, and we certainly didn’t circulate a letter threatening ourselves, the universe of people who possessed that letter during those 20 hours was vanishingly small. As our attorneys put it: “The implication is obvious and the conclusion is inescapable.”

We have formally demanded written confirmation of whether the Letts, or anyone acting on their behalf, caused, facilitated, or authorized the “Phoebe Trull” communications. We await their answer. So does the court. And we’re filing a subpoena with GoDaddy to get to the bottom of it.

The Math That Started All of This

Why is the Letts family so desperate to stop our reporting? Perhaps because the reporting concerns numbers (their own numbers, filed under penalty of perjury with the IRS), and numbers do not retract.

InVest USA solicits donations from the public on the promise of putting bulletproof vests on law enforcement officers. Its website today claims “17,100+ Vests” donated over the life of the organization. Michael Letts has publicly stated these vests cost approximately $700 each. Simple arithmetic: 17,100 vests at $700 apiece would require nearly $12 million in vest expenditures over the organization’s history.

That all-time number is hard to test on its own. But Letts’s own public statements put dates on the claim, and the dates are where the math breaks down. As detailed in our counsel’s July 14 response:

December 2021: A December 22, 2021 article claimed that “6,500 active concealable shooting vests have been distributed” up to that point. At $700 per vest, that would require $4,550,000 in vest expenditures by the end of 2021.

June 2023: Letts’s personal website claims that as of June 2023, more than 13,520 vests had been distributed. That means over 7,000 additional vests in a mere 18-month window, requiring roughly another $4,900,000 across 2022 and 2023 alone.

Now hold those dated claims up against what InVest USA actually told the IRS. Its public Forms 990 only appear for the years 2015 through 2023, and here are the itemized vest expenditures in the years leading up to that December 2021 claim, according to its own filings as detailed in our counsel’s response:

Over that five-year period, the organization raised more than $2.7 million from the public and itemized a grand total of $19,273 on actual vests. At $700 per vest, that supports roughly 27 vests purchased in those five years. That works out to about seven-tenths of one percent of the money raised in that window going to the very mission (“protecting those who protect us”) that donors were told they were funding. To be on pace for 6,500 vests distributed by the end of 2021, the filings for these years plus 2020 and 2021 would need to show millions of dollars in vest spending. They show nothing close.

Where did the money go instead? Hundreds of thousands of dollars into “Printing,” “Postage / Mailing,” and “Professional Fundraising Services”: the machinery of soliciting more money.

And in 2020 and 2021, when fundraising exploded past $2 million per year, and when the overwhelming majority of those 6,500 claimed vests would have had to be purchased, the vest line item didn’t grow. It vanished:

2020: Raised $2,085,623. Vest purchases completely un-itemized, while $1,110,379 went to postage and printing alone.

2021: Raised $2,334,501. Vests un-itemized; $1,311,785 to postage and printing.

2022: Raised $1,827,721. Vests un-itemized; $1,053,885 to postage and printing.

2023: Raised $1,322,770. Exactly $0 itemized for vests, alongside $500,783 in “Office Expenses” and $409,610 in “General Administrative” costs.

As for the June 2023 claim: purchasing $4.9 million worth of new vests during 2022 and 2023, when the organization’s total combined revenue for those two years was only about $3.15 million, is, as our attorneys put it, mathematically impossible on the organization’s own reported numbers.

These aren’t our characterizations. These are InVest USA’s own sworn filings, held up against InVest USA’s own public claims. Reporting that gap is not defamation. It is arithmetic.

The Resume That Falls Apart Under Scrutiny

Michael Letts has built his fundraising empire on a persona: the grizzled veteran lawman, “America’s Top Cop,” a man of the badge asking you to protect his brothers and sisters in uniform.

Here is what he and his organizations have claimed, in public, across different platforms:

A 30-year law enforcement veteran (PJ Media, California Globe, Coast to Coast AM, his own website MichaelLetts.us, and a January 2022 PRWeb press release).

A US Army combat veteran (podcast appearance bios).

“Special Forces” (a claim repeated privately to business associates, including by Karen Letts and InVest USA’s own CIO, per our prior reporting).

A “Colonel” (the title page of a screenplay he commissioned about his own life).

A 9/11 first responder at Ground Zero (Coast to Coast AM and his own website).

Chaplain at the Columbia Police Department, Chaplain at the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), and State Constable for the State of South Carolina (the InVest USA team page and MichaelLetts.us, both quoted at length in our counsel’s July 14 response).

Recipient of a “Congressional Gold Medal Award for Community Service” (his own website).

Now here is what the record shows:

SLED has denied, on the record to The State newspaper, that Letts serves as its chaplain.

A licensed private investigator retained in connection with our litigation located no record of Letts ever serving as a sworn law enforcement officer anywhere. Not for 30 years. Not for one day.

When the president of the Texas Fraternal Order of Police checked with the National FOP in 2024, at Letts’s own request, the National FOP reported no current membership record for him in its system.

The Congressional Gold Medal is awarded by an Act of Congress, and its recipients are a matter of public record. No Act of Congress awarding Michael Letts that medal has been located.

The military claims contradict each other. Army combat veteran, Special Forces, and “Colonel” are different stories told to different audiences, and no version is corroborated by any independent record we have located.

In Letts’s own published book, the introduction states “I have spent time in the military.” His formal author bio, in the same book, claims no military service, no law enforcement career, and no chaplaincy at all.

And in June 2023, Letts sat for roughly 100 pages of sworn deposition testimony, under oath, where false statements carry real consequences. Across those 100 pages, not one of these credentials appears. The combat veteran, the 30-year cop, the Colonel: under oath, they all went silent.

As we previously reported, the sheriff whose department arrested Letts in 2020 told us directly that we had been duped, and that “everything we’d been told by Michael Letts was a lie.”

We publish for the men and women who actually wore the uniform, actually took the oath, and actually bled for this country. They know better than anyone what it means when a man raises millions of dollars wrapped in a resume that no agency, no record, and no sworn testimony will stand behind. Letts is free to produce a DD-214, a certification record, a chaplain appointment letter, or a constable commission. We will publish them the day he does.

The Public Record They Don’t Want Reported

The cease-and-desist letter implies that references to Michael Letts’s criminal history are defamatory. But arrest records are public records, and reporting them accurately is protected by the fair-report privilege. Here is the public record:

On April 1, 2020, Michael Letts was arrested by the Richland County Sheriff’s Department and charged with incest, two counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor, and third-degree criminal sexual conduct. The charges alleged the sexual abuse of an underage female relative over a span of seven years, beginning when she was ten years old. The arrest was covered at the time by the Associated Press, ABC, CBS, and multiple South Carolina outlets. The State of South Carolina ultimately entered a nolle prosequi, a dismissal that, under South Carolina law, is not an acquittal and is not a finding of innocence.

In 2022, Michael Allan Letts was arrested and charged with shoplifting in Richland County, South Carolina (Case No. 2022A4010200395).

We report these as what they are: arrests and charges, with their dispositions accurately stated. That is lawful. That is journalism. And no letter from Chicago changes it.

The Part He Most Wants Buried: A “Children’s Ranch” for Abused Kids

Read the cease and desist again carefully and you’ll notice something. It doesn’t just demand our silence about Michael Letts, Karen Letts, and InVest USA. It demands, by name, that we never again publish any statement about an entity called Broken Arrow Children’s Ranch.

Why would that name be on the list?

Because Michael and Karen Letts have launched a brand-new nonprofit venture called the Broken Arrow Children’s Ranch, marketed to the donating public as “A Safe Haven For Abused And Exploited Children.” Its website has featured what appears to be an AI-generated image of Michael and Karen Letts surrounded by children presented as the abused and exploited kids the ranch exists to serve.

Now hold that marketing material next to the public record you just read.

The same man who was arrested in 2020 and charged with incest and multiple counts of criminal sexual conduct with a minor, in a case alleging seven years of sexual abuse of a child beginning at age ten, is now asking the public to trust him, and to fund him, as the guardian of a haven for abused and exploited children.

We are not telling you what to conclude. The 2020 charges were resolved by nolle prosequi, and we have reported that disposition accurately. But we are telling you what any parent, any donor, any charity regulator, and any child-welfare agency is entitled to know before a single dollar or a single child is placed in that organization’s care: the full, documented public record of its founder. That is precisely the information the cease and desist demanded we erase.

We will not erase it. Protecting kids means shining the light before something happens, not after.

A Threat Letter With Problems of Its Own

The irony of the July 1 letter is that, in attempting to threaten us, it may have created more legal exposure for its senders than for its targets. As our attorneys’ response lays out:

It threatens a company that doesn’t exist. The letter is directed at “SPM Performance LLC,” an entity with which we have no affiliation and of which we have no knowledge. A demand letter that can’t correctly name its target isn’t intimidating. It’s embarrassing.

It identifies no defamatory statement. Not one quote. Not one date. Not one post. Under Florida law, falsity is measured statement by statement, and Florida’s pre-suit notice statute requires a prospective libel plaintiff to identify the exact statements alleged to be false. The letter identifies none.

It threatens criminal prosecution to extract a civil concession. Florida Bar Rule 4-3.4(g) flatly prohibits lawyers from threatening criminal charges solely to gain advantage in a civil matter. Worse, under Fla. Stat. § 836.05, a written threat to accuse someone of a crime in order to compel them to act against their will is itself a second-degree felony in Florida.

It was sent by an out-of-state lawyer. The letter’s author is a member of the Illinois bar. He is not admitted to practice in Florida or South Carolina, yet he directed a litigation threat to Florida residents and Florida entities, on behalf of South Carolina clients, in a dispute with zero connection to Illinois. Our attorneys’ response details why that conduct appears to constitute the unauthorized practice of law under Florida statute and the Illinois State Bar Association’s own guidance.

We have demanded that the letter be withdrawn in its entirety within seven days, that the false “dismissal” claim be formally retracted, that all threats of criminal prosecution be withdrawn, and that the Letts confirm in writing whether they caused or authorized the “Phoebe Trull” campaign.

Why We Will Not Be Silenced

Michael Letts is not a private citizen minding his own business. He is a man who has run for the South Carolina State Senate and for county council, who hosts his own weekly show, who has written dozens of columns for national outlets, who has appeared on newscasts and podcasts hundreds of times, and who solicits millions of dollars a year from the public (much of it from people who love and want to protect police officers) while calling himself “America’s Top Cop.”

When you build a public brand on the backs of America’s law enforcement community and ask the public for their money in officers’ names, the public gets to ask where the money went. Donors get to ask. Cops get to ask. And journalists get to report the answers found in your own tax filings and your own public record.

Law Enforcement Today exists to stand up for the men and women behind the badge. That includes standing up for them when someone raises money in their name. Every dollar donated to put a vest on an officer that doesn’t put a vest on an officer is a dollar taken from the very people we exist to defend.

So no. We will not cease. We will not desist. Our lawsuit remains pending in St. Lucie County. Our reporting will continue. If the Letts family makes the ill-advised decision to file the lawsuit they threaten, our attorneys will move immediately for dismissal under Florida’s anti-SLAPP statute and pursue mandatory recovery of fees and damages. And, as our counsel noted, such a suit would hand us the immediate right to compel disclosure, through court-ordered discovery, of the very financial records at the heart of this story.

They sent a letter demanding darkness.

Consider this our reply: the lights just got brighter. And we’re just warming up.

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Kyle Reyes is the publisher of Law Enforcement Today and the CEO of The Silent Partner Marketing, LLC, the plaintiff in The Silent Partner Marketing, LLC v. Invest to Protect Our Law Enforcement Officers, Inc., et al., Case No. 562025CA001960AXXXHC (Fla. 19th Cir. Ct., St. Lucie County). The factual assertions in this editorial are drawn from the July 1, 2026 correspondence of Skyles Law Group, LLC; the July 14, 2026 response of GrayRobinson, P.A.; the public docket of the St. Lucie County Circuit Court; InVest USA’s publicly available IRS Forms 990; contemporaneous news coverage of the public arrest records referenced herein; the publicly available websites, press releases, published book, and media appearances of Michael Letts and InVest USA; sworn deposition testimony of Michael Letts taken June 21, 2023; and the prior published reporting of Law Enforcement Today.