Utah political consultant Gabi Finlayson was driving out of a canyon last week when she got the news that she had been accused of being a Chinese government operative.

She was driving to a speaking engagement in central Utah with her colleague, Jackie Morgan. When their car climbed out of the canyon and back into cell service, their phones were going off.

“Jackie and I each had like five text messages saying, you know, are you okay, did you see this, it’s gonna get worse before it gets better, but just hang in there.” They weren’t sure what happened, Finlayson said, until someone sent them the video.

Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank billionaire investor trying to build a 40,000-acre data center campus in Finlayson and Morgan’s home state, had gone on Fox News. His “guys” had done a “deep dig into the IP addresses,” he said, and found “two cells inside of Utah” affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party: Finlayson and Morgan’s group, Elevate Strategies, as well as the nonprofit Alliance for a Better Utah.

Finlayson and Morgan call the claim an out-and-out lie motivated by their opposition to a controversial Utah data center. “You don’t wake up in the morning often thinking, like, maybe I’ll get accused of sedition today on Fox News by Kevin O’Leary, but here we are,” Finlayson told me. “I’d probably get paid a lot more if I was” being paid by a foreign government, Elizabeth Huntchings, of Alliance for a Better Utah, told Fox News.

They spoke against the........

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