In June 2025, as the 2026 midterm elections were starting to heat up, a newly formed company named Arizona Land Reserve made a huge donation to the Nevada Republican Party. Its $50,000 contribution instantly made it one of the state GOP’s largest benefactors. Early the next year, the upstart company—which was seeking to build “fly-in luxury home ranches” on a remote tract in northwestern Arizona, part of an investment strategy that aimed to “provide our Investors with a constant 20% annual return for the next 20 years”—cut another $50,000 check, this one to the political action arm of Turning Point USA. In June, Arizona Land Reserve and one of its founders, Robert McDowell, each contributed $50,000 to a political committee for the House Freedom Caucus.
Last week, Arizona Land Reserve turned up again. It was listed as an asset on a hastily drafted and long overdue financial disclosure for Nevada Republican David Flippo, whose congressional campaign received coveted endorsements from both Turning Point Action and the Freedom Caucus Fund. Before winning the GOP primary, Flippo also seemed to benefit from an unusual level of support from Nevada GOP chair Michael McDonald, who recorded a message endorsing Flippo before Nevada voters went to the polls. A conservative blogger claimed McDonald had also lobbied Donald Trump on Flippo’s behalf. Trump’s crucial backing came through shortly before the primary, helping to seal Flippo’s victory. (Turning Point Action, the Freedom Caucus Fund, and the Nevada GOP did not respond to requests for comment.)
His relationship with Arizona Land Reserve and its political donations to groups that supported him raise new concerns about the personal and campaign finances of the Nevada Republican. The company has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to market $20 million in securities, and its promotion of consistent double-digit investment returns resembles the SEC’s depiction of investments that are “likely a scam,” according to an investing guide published by the agency. Moreover, McDowell, its co-founder, has a record of corporate bankruptcies, business failures, and bad debts. Court records show he has been accused of fraud on multiple occasions. In one case, he and his business partners were accused of operating a “pyramid promotional scheme,” according to Arizona court records. (Their company was found liable for breach of contract in this matter.)
Flippo and McDowell did not respond to detailed requests for comment.
The murky finances of Flippo’s campaign have already come under scrutiny. Mother Jones reported that Flippo, who previously ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2024, had loaned or given his political campaigns more than $2 million, but the source of the money is unclear, since the retired career Air Force lieutenant colonel does not appear to have the financial means to bankroll his political operation to that extent.
Flippo himself is a licensed financial adviser, who was fired from a previous job because he allegedly “violated numerous company policies and regulatory regulations related to electronic communications, books and records,” according to a disclosure published by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). His involvement with Arizona Land Reserve—which is not just an asset, but one of his biggest—could bring him under the scrutiny of financial regulators.
Flippo’s campaign has been bruised by multiple controversies, including reporting by The Washington Post and other news outlets that he misrepresented his military record by touting a Bronze Star for valor that he did not receive. (Flippo holds a Bronze Star, but not with added valor distinction. In military circles, that is no minor difference.) The Reno Gazette-Journal added to Flippo’s struggles this week, when it reported that Flippo was fired from his role as an Air Force squadron commander in 2008.
Flippo is locked in an unusually competitive race against Democrat Teresa Benitez-Thompson in a sprawling district encompassing Reno. Flippo’s hard-right candidacy and status as a recent transplant to Reno have divided Nevada Republicans. Mark Amodei, who is retiring from the seat Flippo hopes to win, called him a “fraud” in an article about the Bronze Star claims and refused to back him in both the primary and general election. Due to his vulnerabilities, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently added this deep red district to its “Red to Blue” program, identifying it as a possible flip opportunity.
Last week, Flippo provided a handwritten financial disclosure to the Nevada Independent after Mother Jones reported that, dating back to 2023, Flippo had repeatedly failed to file the legally required document as a congressional candidate—even as he reported huge personal loans or contributions to his campaigns that do not fit the profile of a candidate who lacks a source of obvious wealth. After retiring from the Air Force, he did preventive maintenance work for BP in Alaska, then joined a company called First Command as a financial advisor. In late 2024, the company fired Flippo for an offense related to “bearer bonds,” according to FINRA. Such bonds are a type of debt security whose trade has been severely restricted in the United States because of their use in money laundering and other illicit activities. (“They found nothing to discipline me for,” Flippo told The Nevada Independent of his firing. “I wasn’t fined for anything. I didn’t lose any licenses.”)
Far from settling questions about Flippo’s finances, his disclosure raised a host of new ones.
Flippo reported retirement assets worth between about $65,000 and $500,000 and brokerage and bank accounts valued between about $315,000 and $1.1 million. He also reported having up to $1 million in debt through a line of credit, as well as up to $200,000 in additional liabilities related to personal and home improvement loans. These debts do not appear to include the more than $400,000 mortgage Flippo took out in 2020 to buy his home in Las Vegas, according to Clark County records. (Congressional candidates are not required to report debt on their home mortgages.)
Those numbers are striking considering the more than $1.6 million that Flippo has loaned to his current campaign. Flippo has also told the Federal Election Commission that all of his loans come from personal funds and are not linked to other loans.
“There are a lot of questions about this filing at the outset,” said Brendan Fischer, the director of strategic investigations at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “But even taking it at face value, it hardly answers the question of how Flippo came up with $1.6 million to loan to his campaign.” Fischer added that “there are serious questions about the valuation of some of his biggest assets, and the other numbers really don’t add up to somebody who has $1.6 million in extra cash to put into a congressional run.”
Flippo listed two other major assets on his disclosure, both valued at between $1 and $5 million, comprising much of his net worth. One is called America First Home Mortgage. The other Flippo reported as “AZ Land Reserve PPM Meadview AZ.” According to the form, neither of these investments produced any income.
But a nationwide search of corporate registrations shows no record of an active company in the United States called America First Home Mortgage. The CEO of a similarly named Las Vegas company, America First Mortgage, told me his company has no affiliation with Flippo. He also knows of no business that goes by that name.
Arizona Land Reserve does exist, though it is peculiar for other reasons. It was formed in January 2025 by Robert McDowell and Stephen C. Tuminello, top Flippo fundraisers who co-hosted a Reno fundraiser attended by Rep. Jim Jordan, a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus, in August and who also attended an event for Flippo’s 2024 campaign. The mailing address listed for McDowell is an 8-room motel owned by his company, Canyons End, in Meadview, Arizona. Court records show that McDowell has been accused in legal filings of fraud, promoting a pyramid scheme, and repeatedly failing to pay debts he and his companies have incurred.
“[H]e takes money from investors and never paid [them] back,” the man who sold McDowell the Meadview motel alleged in court filings, calling McDowell a “con.” His comments came in connection with the 2021 bankruptcy of Canyons End, the McDowell LLC that owns the property. Federal court records show McDowell’s motel LLC ended up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to numerous creditors, including federal and state tax authorities, which the company agreed to pay more than $250,000.
Years earlier, another McDowell-connected enterprise, a gold mining venture named Rock Cabin Mining LLC, was successfully sued for breach of contract by a customer. “Defendants acted with an evil hand guided by an evil mind,” the plaintiff alleged in a fraud claim. Rock Cabin Mining promotional materials filed as part of the case showed that it claimed it could mine about $23 million of gold annually. The company filed for bankruptcy in August 2018.
Documents filed in federal court portray the mining venture as a total failure. In response to Rock Cabin Mining’s bankruptcy plan, a United States Trustee wrote, “There is simply no credible evidence that the Debtor will be able to mine any gold at all much less generate over $6 million in one year from what is currently just raw land.” Nor was it the first time that one of McDowell’s companies had failed in a gold mining venture, according to court documents. The bankruptcy case ended disastrously for creditors with the trustee only managing to collect 82 cents, according to court records.
Following the bankruptcies of Rock Cabin Mining and Canyons End, McDowell eventually took on a much more audacious project by forming Arizona Land Reserve with Tuminello. McDowell’s history of business failures did not prevent the partners from purchasing a large tract of land in an isolated section of northwestern Arizona.
David Shapiro, the Las Vegas businessman whose company sold Arizona Land Reserve the property and loaned it the $4.8 million to execute the transaction, told me McDowell has always paid him on time but that he hasn’t kept a close eye on his development efforts. Shapiro seemed unsure what to make of the venture when I described how McDowell’s company had raised money for Arizona Land Reserve and another project in Arizona.
According to the company’s website, “The purpose of Arizona Land Reserve is to acquire, develop and manage properties that provide our Investors with a constant 20% annual return for the next 20 years.” The company says that its next step is developing Valle Privado, a “1st class fly-in community catering to the desires of Luxury Home & Ranch Owners in Arizona that prefer to use private aviation to access their property.” In theory, Valle Privado residents will be able to land on a purpose-built mile-long runway.
That would be a major transformation in the section of Arizona where Arizona Land Reserve says it’s planning to build. A contractor who has worked on the project told me that the site is located in a notably poor section of Arizona with a number of “squatters” in the property’s general vicinity. He also said that, as of last year, the site required miles of offroad driving to access.
“Promises of consistent double-digit returns are consistently frauds,” the SEC warns in a “Five Questions to Ask Before You Invest” guide on its website. But that’s not the only part of Arizona Land Reserve’s investment strategy that raises red flags. In a press release posted on Arizona Land Reserve’s Facebook page, the company said it planned to initially raise $20 million in exchange for a 20 percent equity stake in the company. That would value the venture at $100 million and require annual dividend payments of $4 million to investors.
An operating agreement for Arizona Land Reserve obtained by Mother Jones shows that Tuminello and McDowell took an 80 percent ownership stake, despite having contributed only $50,000 each, according to the document.
To generate revenue while the Arizona land was being developed, the company said it planned to “actively acquire, with $14,000,000 of capital, 3,000 Bank Owned (REO) multi-family apartments located in central and mid-western states.” That works out to a cost of less than $5,000 per unit, unless the company borrowed heavily. I asked Shapiro, whose company holds the debt on Arizona Land Reserve’s property, if he thought it was possible to obtain that many properties with that amount of capital. He provided a one-word response: “No.”
One of the investors McDowell and Tuminello pitched, and who asked to remain anonymous, recalled being flown by helicopter over the proposed development site. He said that Flippo was present at several meetings with McDowell and Tuminello and appeared to be representing the interests of Arizona Land Reserve. The prospective investor said he grew wary of their company and ultimately declined to invest. (Tuminello did not respond to a request for comment.)
Arizona Land Reserve seems to have had better luck with other prospects. A document filed with the SEC earlier this year states that the company has sold more than $6.8 million of the $20 million in securities it hopes to place. On the form, the company also makes the improbable claim that it recently brought in between $25 and $100 million in revenue.
One person listed in FEC records as a major donor to Flippo’s campaigns told me they had not donated anything to Flippo, let along the thousands of dollars attributed to them. Fischer said that “suggests very serious campaign finance violations.”
From the outset, Flippo and Arizona Land Reserve appear to have been closely intertwined. Prior to the formation of Arizona Land Reserve, Tuminello spoke at a May 2024 campaign event for Flippo during his first run for Congress, a video from the event shows. In May 2025, as Flippo mounted a new bid for Congress, McDowell and Tuminello became some of his first donors outside of the candidate’s family members. Soon after, Arizona Land Reserve sent its $50,000 to the Nevada Republican Party. The following year came its $50,000 donations to the Turning Point PAC and the Freedom Caucus Fund.
Flippo’s close involvement with the company raises the prospect that he may have used the venture as a vehicle to curry favor with influential Republicans. The congressional candidate may have also helped to provide Arizona Land Reserve with a sense of legitimacy. The company’s public Facebook page includes photos of Flippo at two events. It singles him out as a featured guest at a November 2025 watch party for a Las Vegas F1 race, where Flippo was photographed on a high-rise balcony with a cigar in hand. He also attended a 2025 business aviation conference in Las Vegas with Tuminello, the Facebook page shows.
Flippo has also benefitted from major donations from others in McDowell’s and Tuminello’s orbits, FEC records show. Those donations tended to arrive in the final days of the FEC’s quarterly reporting periods, when candidates are under pressure to demonstrate the viability of their campaigns. (Flippo’s six-figure loans to his campaign followed a similar pattern.) On September 30, 2025, at least five people with ties to McDowell or Tuminello were listed as donating the legal maximum of $7,000 to Flippo’s campaign.
That included Brenda Lee McGarry, McDowell’s ex-wife. Another donor listed under the first and middle name of a woman who has posted about being McDowell’s current wife was reported as donating $3,500 that day. (Neither McGarry or McDowell’s partner responded to requests for comment.)
One person listed in FEC records as a major donor to Flippo’s campaigns told me they had not donated anything to Flippo, let alone the thousands of dollars attributed to them. Fischer said that “suggests very serious campaign finance violations.”
“Making a donation in the name of another person is a clear violation of the law,” he explained. “It’s a violation of the straw donor ban, which is one of the most serious violations in campaign finance law, and one that can potentially result in criminal penalties.”
Outside of Flippo’s own family, federal records show that McDowell’s and Tuminello’s circles have been Flippo’s most important source of fundraising. During key quarters in 2025, his outside fundraising would have been significantly diminished without the money of people they appear to know.
Along with their business dealings, McDowell and Tuminello have also both been affiliated with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), which the Anti-Defamation League considers an “anti-government extremist group.” The group’s central (and unfounded) claim, according to the ADL, is that sheriffs are the ultimate legal authority in their jurisdictions.
CSPOA placed particular emphasis on efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 election. In a September 2022 email obtained by CalMatters, Tuminello, who has acted as a spokesman for the group, emailed Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside County, California, to say that CSPOA could help assist with “Election Integrity” efforts. “This is our Primary focus at the CSPOA!” he added.
Flippo has staked out his own right-wing positions, including a pledge to introduce a bill banning Sharia law as his first piece of legislation if elected. This week, Flippo was invited to debate his Democratic opponent, where he would have likely faced questions about his policy stances and about the overlapping controversies that have dogged his campaign. But Flippo declined to attend.
One question the debate moderator could have posed was whether Flippo had in fact filed the financial disclosure form he recently provided to the media. “All successfully filed records are posted on the Clerk’s website,” Ben Kelley, a spokesperson for the House Clerk’s office, said. No records for Flippo have been posted on that website.
Among the oddities in the Flippo disclosure document provided to the media, Fischer noted, was that a few pages were missing. That includes the page where the candidate must sign the document, under penalty of potential civil and criminal sanctions, and attest that its contents are “true, complete, and correct.”
In light of all the irregularities, Fischer said, “I don’t even know how to describe what this report is.”