Technology

EXCLUSIVE: Crypto Billionaire’s Solar PAC Rewrites Attack Ad After Trump-Backed Republican Threatens Lawsuit

(Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour)

A crypto billionaire’s solar super PAC rewrote its attack ad on an upstate New York Republican after the House candidate’s lawyers threatened a defamation lawsuit.

A lawyer for the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC wrote on Oct. 17 that “instructions have been given to suspend any further distribution of the current ad, including suspending the television ad buy and removing the ad from the internet until these issues are resolved,” according to an email obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The PAC said Tuesday it is putting $250,000 more behind the ad buy and sent the DCNF a new version that drops the claim Trump-endorsed Republican nominee Anthony Constantino’s lawyers had called false, that he “thinks Kill the Police is a good slogan.”

“Our firm is defamation counsel to Anthony Constantino,” Tom Clare of the law firm Clare Locke wrote to the PAC’s treasurer on Oct. 16. A third-party user created and uploaded the “Kill the Police” sticker to Sticker Mule, Constantino’s custom sticker company, where users can design and sell their own products, and the company removed it at his direction as soon as it learned of it, the letter said.

“The advertisement is provably false,” Clare wrote. He demanded that the PAC suspend a television buy set to begin the next day and remove the ad from Vimeo, and he warned that the PAC “should reasonably anticipate litigation over this matter.”

The PAC reported spending $1 million to oppose Constantino in New York’s 21st Congressional District, according to a Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing received Oct. 17. Chris Larsen, a billionaire co-founder of the blockchain payments company Ripple, gave the PAC $6 million of the roughly $6.89 million it raised through the end of August, FEC records show.

In a second letter dated Oct. 17, Clare wrote that the PAC had gone ahead with airing the ad “on multiple television stations” and demanded a public retraction.

Constantino, an Amsterdam, New York, business owner, faces Democratic nominee Blake Gendebien, a St. Lawrence County farmer, for the seat Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik is leaving, the Press-Republican reported.

The PAC’s “campaign against me was so dishonest that they admitted in writing that they cannot move forward with it,” Constantino said in a statement his campaign sent to the DCNF.

“I stand strongly against turning farmland into Chinese solar fields, which is what this PAC is all about. Blake Gendebien has some explaining to do,” Constantino added.

The new version says Constantino’s company “hosted a listing” for a “Kill the Police” sticker. The PAC did not say why it dropped the “good slogan” line.

“Anthony Constantino may lawyer up, but he can’t sticker over the truth: he’s gotten rich off selling vile merch, including hosting a listing for a ‘Kill the Police’ sticker and other anti-cop listings that are still active today,” Chris Coffey, a spokesperson for the PAC and chief executive of Tusk Strategies, the New York consulting firm that runs it, said in a statement to the DCNF.

Two listings the PAC pointed to — an “Acab” T-shirt and a “Let’s Make Bacon” sticker — were still live on Sticker Mule on Tuesday, a DCNF review found. Both were posted by users’ shops and showed no orders. The original ad’s Vimeo page no longer loaded as of Tuesday. “Acab” is shorthand for the anti-police slogan “all cops are bastards” while “bacon” appears to be a reference to using the pejorative “pigs” for police officers.

“As a token of our gratitude and recognition of his desire to spread that message, ITC PAC is putting $250,000 more behind the original ad buy to make sure all of NY-21 knows the real Anthony Constantino,” Coffey added. The $250,000 comes on top of the $1 million the PAC has already reported spending against Constantino, the PAC said.

“Anybody can create a listing at Sticker Mule. The listing in question was removed as soon as it was noticed by the team as it violates our guidelines,” Constantino said in a second statement his campaign sent to the DCNF on Tuesday.

“We have since started using Super Intelligence to proactively stop radicals from uploading violating designs. I am glad to have the endorsement of tens of thousands of police officers across the state because people know I am fighting for a safer New York, unlike the Democrat Party that opened our borders,” he added.

The PAC said in early October it planned to spend $15 million against Republicans in seven House races, Canary Media reported. Three of the targets are incumbents who backed ending the Biden-era solar and wind tax credits in 2025, and the other four, including Constantino, are first-time nominees.

The PAC’s donors also include Jigar Shah, who ran the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, which lends federal money to energy projects, under former President Joe Biden from 2021 to January 2025, according to his biography at the World Resources Institute, where he is a senior fellow. Shah gave the PAC $50,000 on March 3, according to FEC records.

Larsen, Shah and the Gendebien campaign did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

The PAC paid Tusk Strategies for “Ad Production and Buy” against Constantino on Oct. 15, and the ads began running the next day, according to the filing.

The original 30-second ad, reviewed by the DCNF, never mentions solar, and neither does the new version. The original attacked Constantino over a “Kill the Police” sticker listing on his company’s platform and said he “doesn’t share our upstate values.”

Someone used Constantino’s sticker company to briefly print stickers reading “Kill the Police,” Wired reported Oct. 14. When the PAC spent almost $1.5 million to oppose Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy’s run for attorney general, its ads never mentioned solar either, according to the outlet.

“Don’t talk about renewables. Don’t talk about climate,” Coffey told Wired. “Pick the best issue that we can pick.”

David Blackmon, an energy analyst and writer, said in a statement to the DCNF that Coffey’s advice to avoid renewables and climate matches what Democratic candidates are being told this election season.

“Both topics have become toxic to most voters who’ve begun to resent having been forced by Democrat politicians to subsidize billions of dollars on alternative forms of energy that end up destabilizing power grids and raising their utility bills,” he added.

A Siena poll taken Sept. 30 to Oct. 6 had Gendebien ahead 46 percent to 42 percent among likely voters, the Times Union reported. A Constantino campaign spokesperson called it “another scam poll” and pointed to a Gendebien campaign survey that showed Constantino slightly ahead.

“That PAC’s specific mandate is to advocate for solar farms. I’m fighting against solar farms,” Constantino said during an Oct. 6 interview with Albany’s WRGB, according to the Press-Republican.

“Solar should succeed on its own merits, and I think it can. But we need to put farmers ahead of the solar lobby,” he wrote on X on Oct. 18.

Gendebien has said he supports some solar development but not on the region’s best farmland.

“I support an all-of-the-above energy approach, but all-of-the-above can’t mean anywhere at any cost. Our best farmland should grow food,” Gendebien said in a statement, the Press-Republican reported. “When panels do go on farms, they should be designed so livestock can continue grazing the pasture underneath.”

Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, said in a statement to the DCNF that “taxpayers deserve to know when an industry that benefits from billions in government subsidies is spending millions to influence who writes the laws governing those subsidies.”

“What’s particularly revealing is the advice not to talk about renewables or climate. If solar energy is as affordable, reliable, and economically competitive as its advocates claim, why avoid talking about it?” Isaac added.

Stuart Turley, president and CEO of the Sandstone Group and host of the Energy News Beat podcast, said in a statement to the DCNF that the PAC’s spending is not surprising because Democrats “have tried to run from the true costs” of energy. He said net-zero policies in blue states, not President Donald Trump, have done the most to drive up power prices.

Asked whether the ads will change how Republicans in Congress approach solar, Turley said, “No – but it will impact those that don’t do their research on the real cost of energy.”

Alex Stevens, a spokesperson for the conservative American Energy Alliance, said in a statement to the DCNF that “the solar industry has claimed solar is the cheapest form of electricity generation, yet it lobbies vigorously to keep lavish federal subsidies, so they need to decide which side of their argument they truly believe.”

The PAC’s $2 million ad buy against Republican Indiana Rep. Victoria Spartz goes after her record on health care funding rather than her effort to end the clean energy tax credits, Canary Media reported.

“Attacking American energy now comes with a real political cost,” Tom Matzzie, the PAC’s executive chair, said in a statement announcing the Spartz buy, according to the outlet.

“Playing hardball politics, that’s what our opponents do, right, in oil and gas? And I just think the solar industry has been—I don’t know how to describe it—a little too nice,” Larsen, the Ripple co-founder, told Wired.

T1 Energy, a Texas solar manufacturer, has warned against the PAC’s approach. Russell Gold, the company’s executive vice president for strategic communications, told Wired that if the PAC “becomes about going after Republicans and turns solar back into a partisan issue, that would be an epic blunder.”

“If solar goes back to being a one-party issue, that would be disastrous for American workers and American power grids,” Gold said in a statement to the DCNF on Tuesday.

The company has invested more than $1 billion in solar manufacturing in Texas and created 1,500 jobs, Gold added.

Larsen’s contributions came in four checks between February and June, the largest for $5 million, according to FEC records. Matzzie is chief executive of CleanChoice Energy, and the PAC’s co-founders include former Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune, Wired reported.

The general election money comes on top of roughly $5 million the PAC spent in Republican primaries, according to Wired. Roy’s campaign denounced “radical California Marxists trying to buy Texas elections.”

A PAC that received money from Invest in Tomorrow also targeted Democratic Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee, Wired reported.

Shah’s work for the solar industry goes back more than a decade. In 2011, he co-founded and chaired the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy, which formed to fight a trade petition from German solar maker SolarWorld that the coalition said would “block or dramatically curtail solar cell imports from China,” according to its founding announcement.

The coalition’s members included the U.S. arms of Chinese manufacturers Suntech, Trina Solar and Yingli, the announcement showed.

The Podesta Group registered to lobby for the coalition in December 2011 on “regulatory action regarding photovoltaic cells,” and listed Trina Solar of Changzhou, China, as a contributor to the effort, according to the firm’s Senate lobbying registration.

“The ‘Invest in Tomorrow Coalition’ should probably be renamed the ‘Invest in Xi Jinping Coalition,'” Ken Braun, a senior investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center, said in a statement to the DCNF.

“Republicans are hardly pure on the issue of subsidies for weather dependent power. But in this case they should wear the scorn of this PAC as a badge of honor,” Braun added.

Early voting in the race begins Oct. 24, and Election Day is Nov. 3, according to the New York State Board of Elections’ political calendar.