The PGA Tour has reportedly suspended Wesley Bryan for playing in a LIV Golf influencer event two weeks ago and now the Saudi-backed Phil Mickelson is calling on Donald Trump‘s Justice Department to go after his former employer.
‘Here’s a question,’ Mickelson, one of the major PGA stars to defect to the rival LIV circuit, wrote on X. ‘Normally when an entity violates independent contract law, they deny that it happened and forces (sic) the contractor/individual to prove that it did.
‘In this case the PGA Tour blatantly admits they are illegally banning an independent contractor so why doesn’t they [Department of Justice] step in and enforce the law?’ asked Mickelson, who agreed to leave the PGA for the Saudi-backed LIV tour for a reported $200 million in 2022. ‘Why does the individual have to sue to enforcer (sic) the law? DOJ do your fffing job!’
The tour has not commented on the suspension, but DailyMail.com has reached out to PGA spokespeople for confirmation and a response to Mickelson’s post.
Bryan told the website Monday Q he doesn’t know how long the ban will last, although he plans on appealing.
He and his brother, George, have become popular for creating content on a YouTube channel, with videos featuring trick shots. Wesley Bryan participated in two PGA Tour influencer events in the past year, including in March, Golf Digest reported.
Phil Mickelson is targeting the PGA Tour after Wesley Bryan was suspended recently
Bryan (pictured) told the website Monday Q he doesn’t know how long the ban will last
But it was a recent event at Donald Trump-owned Doral that appears to have landed Wesley in some trouble with the PGA, which is currently negotiating a merger LIV while banning its own players competing on the Saudi-backed rival.
The event, known as ‘The Duels: Miami,’ featured six LIV golfers and six YouTube creators, all of whom knowingly faced disciplinary action from the PGA as a consequence of participating fin the event, according to the Monday Q report. In the end, only Wesley Bryan was suspended on the day after The Duels went live on Horvat’s channel.
Bryan, 35, is attending but not competing this week in the Corales Puntacana Championship in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, where he finished second last year to Billy Horschel. It is on the schedule opposite the RBC Heritage, which Bryan won in 2017 in his native South Carolina for his lone PGA Tour victory.
‘We had this vacation planned for months, so I decided we would still come down,’ Bryan told MondayQ.com. ‘It’s been a long time since we had a family vacation where golf wasn’t involved.’
He no longer has full tour status and has played in three events in 2025 as recently as March, missing two cuts — the exception a tie for 25th at the Farmers Insurance Open in January. Bryan is 169th in the FedExCup standings (31 points) with $75,068 in official earnings.
LIV Golf’s Phil Mickelson accused the PGA Tour of openly violating contract law
Bryan told Monday Q that he doesn’t regret playing in The Duels.
‘That video is one of the most powerful videos in YouTube golf.’ Bryan said. ‘We are going to continue to support Grant and grow the game through YouTube.’
He also showed gratitude for his career on the PGA Tour.
‘For the last eight or nine years, the opportunities have been amazing,’ Bryan said. ‘I’m extremely grateful to the Tour for that. I don’t want this to be the end of my professional golf career.’
Bryan has made 68 cuts in 134 career PGA Tour events, with five top-five finishes and nine top-10 finishes.
A native of Columbia, South Carolina who played collegiately for the Gamecocks, Bryan turned professional in 2012, joined the tour in 2017 and has earned $5,247,630 in official money, per the tour.
The PGA Tour and the PIF have supposedly been in negotiations for some time now, though the PGA Tour has since acquired additional funding for its new for-profit endeavor, PGA Tour Enterprises, from a coalition of sports owners and investors called Strategic Sports Group.
The respective tour reps have held meetings with President Donald Trump in recent weeks, which have not produced any material progress in the talks.
A report by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations accused the Saudi Public Investment Fund of entering negotiations with the PGA Tour only due to the threat of discovery in their antitrust lawsuit.
The report, released Friday outlined the subcommittee’s findings from an inquiry into the June 2023 ‘framework agreement’ for a merger between the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour and the PIF’s golf assets, namely LIV Golf.
Senator Richard Blumenthal (Democrat, Connecticut), chair of the PSI, was among those concerned about ‘the Saudi government’s role in influencing this effort and the risks posed by a foreign government entity assuming control over a cherished American institution.’
Donald Trump and Phil Mickelson have both done business with the Saudis through LIV Golf
But the subcommittee’s investigation goes further back to before that shocking announcement, when LIV Golf was pursuing antitrust litigation against the PGA Tour for denying golfers the opportunity to play on both tours.
‘The Subcommittee’s inquiry revealed that the first significant back and forth about a potential agreement between the PIF and the PGA Tour began with a renewed push from a representative of the PIF to broker a deal on April 14, 2023,’ the report said, ‘and that a key term of the initial Framework Agreement entered into by the PIF and the PGA Tour involved the dismissal, with prejudice, of pending litigation between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour.
‘On April 7, 2023, a judge in the Northern District of California had ruled in that litigation that the PIF and its Governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, were subject to discovery and depositions by lawyers for the PGA Tour. This deposition would likely have revealed details of the PIF’s operations and Governor al-Rumayyan’s control over its commercial investments.’
Blumenthal went on to write that ‘U.S. defenses are inadequate to protect against increasingly sophisticated foreign influence efforts by Saudi Arabia and other malign actors and exposed loopholes within the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) that allow foreign governments to escape accountability.’