This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Deer Valley • It's been a busy few days for former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, but not busy enough to miss a speech he'd planned for Thursday night in Park City.
On Tuesday, he was in Washington, D.C., meeting with Sen. Orrin Hatch to talk about whether Hatch planned to run for an eighth term in 2018.
White House officials the next day confirmed that he accepted President Donald Trump's offer to be the ambassador to Russia, a nomination to a highly visible post at a time when congressional committees are looking into whether Moscow interfered in the presidential election.
Thursday night, Huntsman was back in Utah, giving a speech at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business Executive Summit, which was closed to the public. The Salt Lake Tribune talked to Huntsman on his way into the event at the Montage at Deer Valley. He again declined to rule out a run for U.S. Senate in 2018.
"We'll let all this stuff play out," Huntsman said.
He and Hatch met this week in what he described as a "courtesy call" to the senior senator, who previously said his 2012 election would be his last.
"As I was thinking about '18 as a possibility, I wanted to go in and talk about what he was thinking about doing and what we were thinking about doing," Huntsman told The Tribune.
He said the two had planned the meeting about three months prior.
"I wanted to see if he was seriously thinking about running again in '18," Huntsman said. "He didn't know. He said at the time he hadn't really given it a lot of thought yet."
Hatch is slated to address the Eccles School event Friday morning.
Hatch, 82, the longest-serving Republican senator in history and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told CNN on Thursday, "I'm planning on [running] right now."
His office sent out a statement shortly after saying only that his plan for 2018 was to "ensure all options remain on the table."
Huntsman, who in recent months has flirted with a Senate run, declined to comment about his potential ambassadorship, demurring to the White House.
"At the right time there may be something to comment on," he said, "but right now, nothing."
He previously served as the ambassador to China and Singapore and as a U.S. trade representative in 2001.
Twitter: @TaylorWAnderson
Editor's note: The Salt Lake Tribune is owned and published by Paul Huntsman, the brother of former Gov. Jon Huntsman.