This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Liam Fitzpatrick’s was packed on a Tuesday in November, and all eyes in the suburban Orlando, Florida, pub were glued to the TVs behind the bar. Fitzpatrick’s usually had sports on, but this was Election Eve 2020, and Republican state Senate candidate Jason Brodeur watched nervously as the results trickled in. This was his election party. Brodeur’s campaign had spent millions of dollars running him for an open seat against the Democratic nominee, a labor attorney, and the race was neck and neck.

But his backers had a secret weapon. Just before the filing deadline, a substitute teacher named Jestine Iannotti had joined the race as an unaffiliated third-party candidate. A political unknown, she didn’t even campaign. The central Florida district was then carpeted with misleading mailers that appealed to liberal values and voters’ distaste for partisan politics—one included a stock photo that seemed to imply that Iannotti, who is white, is a Black woman. If she siphoned off votes from his Democratic rival, Brodeur stood a better chance.

Iannotti was a “ghost candidate,” one with no hope of winning who runs—or is run—specifically as a spoiler. Ghost candidates are legal in Florida—sort of. Any eligible person can run for public office, but the covert financing of ghost campaigns sometimes runs afoul of even that state’s famously lax election laws. State prosecutors would eventually conclude that Iannotti and another ghost candidate who ran in 2020—along with their political consultants—had broken quite a few. (Brodeur claimed ignorance of the scheme, and has faced no legal action as a result, though a local tax collector on trial for unrelated charges would later testify that Brodeur was well aware of it.)

Also at Fitzpatrick’s that night was then-47-year-old Frank Artiles, a burly, foul-mouthed ex-Marine and former Republican state senator. Artiles, who is Cuban American, had resigned his Senate post in disgrace in 2017 after using racial slurs in front of two Black colleagues during a drunken rant. He, too, was fixated on Brodeur’s returns, as well as the results of an even tighter state Senate race in south Miami-Dade.

The latter contest was a slugfest between one of Florida’s highest-profile Democratic lawmakers, José Javier Rodriguez, and Republican Ileana García, founder of Latinas for Trump. It, too, hinged on a ghost candidate: Alex Rodriguez, a down-on-his-luck salesman of used heavy equipment, whose shared surname with the incumbent was no coincidence. Like Iannotti, Rodriguez hadn’t campaigned. He, too, was boosted by a flood of misleading mailers. 

As the final tallies came in, the mood at Fitzpatrick’s turned electric. Brodeur ended up winning his seat by about 7,600 votes. (Iannotti drew nearly 6,000.) In south Miami-Dade, Garcia, the Republican, edged out incumbent José Rodriguez by fewer than 40 votes. Artiles was jubilant. “That was me!” a partygoer recalls him yelling. “That’s all me!”

At a criminal trial this week in Miami, the prosecution may ask the jury to interpret Artiles’ outburst as an admission of guilt. Four months after the election party, the Miami-Dade state attorney charged him and ghost candidate Rodriquez with multiple campaign finance–related felonies. Among other charges, Artiles stands accused of conspiracy, making excessive campaign contributions, and “false swearing” in connection with voting or elections. If found guilty on all counts, he faces up to five years in prison.

In Central Florida, prosecutors issued a multi-count indictment against Iannotti and the two operatives (Eric Foglesong and Ben Paris, chair of the Seminole County Republican Party) who’d arranged for her to run. (A ghost candidate Artiles had recruited for a third state Senate race—a spa owner whose wife regularly waxed Artiles’ back—was not charged.) In 2022, a jury found Paris guilty of interfering in an election by means of an illegal campaign donation—the state recommended 60 days in jail; the judge gave him a year of probation, community service, and a fine. Foglesong, charged with felony and misdemeanor election crimes, avoided possible jail time by pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges, and Iannotti pleaded no contest last month to a pair of first-degree misdemeanors. Artiles maintains his innocence.

And all of the above might have been just another colorful tale of shady politics in the Sunshine State were it not for a spat between political consultants.

Indeed, after the leaders of Matrix LLC, a high-powered political consulting firm whose CEO helped finance the ghost campaigns, started feuding, the story took on a new life, offering something rarer and more consequential: a glimpse, oddly enough, into the political meddling of one of America’s largest power companies.

The source of the leak was never clear, but as the consultants squabbled, thousands of pages of Matrix’s internal documents made it into the hands of Florida news outlets. The revelations therein, and reporting on discovery materials generated by the various prosecutions, would culminate in the abrupt January 2023 retirement of Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, triggering a single-day, $14 billion drop in the company’s market value.

FPL is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, one of the nation’s largest utility conglomerates in terms of homes and businesses served. And although its parent is a major producer of renewable energy, FPL is among Florida’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters. The leaked documents, in any case, showed that FPL was enmeshed in a covert campaign of media manipulation, surveillance, and what one federal securities lawsuit calls electoral “dirty tricks,” all in the name of maximizing profits.

Investigations by Floodlight and other Florida news outlets would reveal that the ghost candidates were bankrolled with some $730,000 in dark money, $100,000 of which was channeled through a prominent Republican operative into a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that Artiles controlled. (Artiles’ attorney, Frank Quintero, disputes that any of that money ever made it to ghost candidate Rodriguez: “The prosecutor can say whatever the fuck he wants, but the reality is different than what he wants it to be.”) The remaining $630,000 made its way through a daisy chain of opaque nonprofits partially overseen by the CEO of Matrix, which was then working for FPL.

From the utility’s perspective, expanding the state Senate’s Republican majority—by whatever means—would help fulfill its legislative priorities. Those priorities included escaping liability for damages related to power outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma; ousting J.R. Kelly, the state’s long-serving (unsympathetic) consumer utility watchdog; and winning approval from the Senate-confirmed Public Service Commission for Florida’s largest-ever hike in electricity rates. The defeat of Sen. Rodriguez had the added benefit of kneecapping one of the state’s most prominent backers of rooftop solar, which reduces carbon emissions and lowers utility bills—and against which FPL had waged a decade-long counterinsurgency campaign.

FPL, which declined to comment for this article, prevailed on all counts.

The company has steadfastly denied wrongdoing, although it does not dispute hiring Matrix. “They did good work,” then-CEO Silagy told me in June 2022. During the same interview, he admitted to authoring a January 2019 email about Sen. Rodríguez, wherein Silagy ordered his minions “to make his life a living hell”—a directive that was immediately relayed to Matrix.

The utility claims that two outside law firms, whose investigations FPL commissioned but has never made public, have cleared it of election-related liability or wrongdoing, despite reporting that suggests otherwise. The Orlando Sentinel, for example, reported that Silagy sometimes used an email pseudonym (Theodore Hayes) when communicating with Jeff Pitts, then CEO of Matrix. And a 2022 Federal Election Commission complaint accused five nonprofits linked to Pitts of “direct and serious violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act.”

The complaint, dismissed earlier this year after the partisan six-member commission deadlocked on a party-line vote, cites a memo Pitts sent to Silagy laying out how FPL could channel money covertly through a series of nonprofits and, ultimately, a super-PAC, to fund “‘political activities’ on both the state and federal level.” The complaint alleges that “the effect of this scheme would be to illegally hide the identities of the true source or sources of contributions.”  

“Unfortunately, partisan gridlock and dysfunction has become routine at the FEC, which has only opened four investigations this year,” says Stuart McPhail, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the nonprofit that filed the complaint. “That means many complaints, even those for which the FEC’s nonpartisan expert staff recommends an investigation, end in partisan gridlock. That’s exactly what happened with our complaint.”

The scenes to follow are based on thousands of pages of documents and more than 50 interviews with various players. In addition to setting the stage for Artiles’ long-delayed trial, they offer a window into how some utility monopolies have chosen to flex their political power, pushing legal boundaries for financial gain, and sometimes thwarting America’s transition to clean energy in the process.

On a Friday evening in late February 2017, 32 NASCAR race-truck drivers squinted under the Daytona International Speedway’s 2,000-watt lights. Their eyes were fixed on state Sen. Frank Artiles, who sported a suede jacket emblazoned with the NextEra logo. He waved a green flag to kick off the 250-mile race, sponsored by NextEra Energy Resources, another NextEra subsidiary, but just two laps in things went awry—a 17-vehicle pile-up that resulted in one of the trucks getting completely totaled.

Your high school English teacher would call this foreshadowing.

Artiles was then serving his first term in the Florida Senate and chairing its energy committee. That is to say, the elected official who controlled the fate of state bills related to energy and the environment was accepting the red-carpet treatment from a utility holding company that routinely had business before his committee.

Such potential conflicts of interest are not unusual in the utility realm. Investor-owned power companies specialize in charming and lobbying legislators and regulators. A captured regulator might approve a higher profit margin for a power company than an adversarial one would. A friendly legislator is more likely to pass favorable laws. Across the nation, utilities are the most active lobbyists on state environmental bills.

Our system “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines.”

What makes the situation especially irksome is that utilities are not normal companies. The firms that provide gas and electricity and send monthly bills to homeowners and businesses are state-sanctioned monopolies. They don’t make money from selling power per se. Rather, like a waiter with guaranteed tips, their profit margins are pre-determined by regulators based on how much they invest in their infrastructure. The more plants and poles and substations a utility builds, the bigger its guaranteed return, which averages about 10 percent nationwide. (FPL’s have run as high as 11.8 percent.) Politicians and regulators, at least in theory, are supposed to act on behalf of consumers and prevent utilities from running up the tab.

The way the system is set up “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines,” says David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit utility watchdog. “No matter how you slice it,” he adds, “they are among the biggest spenders on political influence generally.”

The numbers are staggering. According to the Institute for Local Self Reliance, an energy think tank, investor-owned utilities have given more than $130 million to federal candidates over the past decade and have spent more than $294 million on state political races between 2014 and 2023.

FPL alone donated at least $42 million to Florida lawmakers between June 2013 and June 2023, according to a Floodlight analysis. And that’s just reported donations. Across the nation, from 2014 to 2020, power companies pumped at least $215 million more into politics via 501(c)(4) nonprofits that don’t have to reveal their donors—which is why these funds are referred to as “dark money.”

Utility influence operations have led to a generational resurgence of fraud and corruption in the sector. A recent Floodlight analysis of three decades of corporate prosecutions and federal lawsuits describes malfeasance that has cost electricity customers at least $6.6 billion over the past 10 years. The costs to the environment and the energy transition are also steep. Utilities in Ohio struck a corrupt bargain with prominent state lawmakers—some of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison—to prop up failing coal and nuclear plants. Utilities in Arizona were investigated by the FBI for using dark money to elect energy regulators who slashed rooftop solar incentives, though no charges have been filed.

Artiles’ Daytona junket didn’t break any laws, but the optics weren’t great. He’d flown in on a private plane that belonged to his campaign treasurer—an FPL lobbyist. The night of the NASCAR race, he took in $10,000 in contributions at a fundraiser in his honor, where he rubbed shoulders with Keanu Reeves. The next day, he visited Disney’s Epcot Center as the guest of John Holley, FPL’s top in-house lobbyist. “It was an honor to be there,” Artiles told the Miami Herald after the news got out. “I’m not going to lie to you. It was cool.”

After returning to Tallahassee, Artiles fast-tracked two bills coveted by FPL.

But like the truck totaled during that second lap at Daytona, the freshman senator’s tenure would be short-lived. About a month after the FPL junket, Artiles got into an argument with two Black fellow senators at a private club near the state Capitol, berating them and using the n-word. The Senate president made Artiles stand and apologize to his colleagues, after which Artiles walked straight out of the chamber and into a gaggle of reporters, shedding his conciliatory tone like a football player doffing sweaty pads. This prompted the legislative Black caucus to demand his expulsion. Artiles resigned two days later.

He was out of the Senate, but not the game. In October 2017, Artiles was invited to a lunch meeting with Ryan Tyson, then a leading Republican operative for Associated Industries of Florida, a powerful trade group to which FPL had donated millions. Tyson, a pollster, had done work on issues critical to FPL, and was executive director of Let’s Preserve the American Dream—a nonprofit that would play a key role in the ghost candidate scandal. Alex Alvarado, Tyson’s protégé, set up the lunch, which Tyson says he does not recall attending. Starting that same month, and continuing into 2021, Artiles would receive $5,000 monthly payments from Tyson for “research services” related to Hispanic voters.

After the 2020 election, Tyson and his group came under the scrutiny of the prosecutors. “We waived all privileges and co-operated with the government in its investigation,” he told me recently. “They couldn’t explain to us what they were looking for, but we were nonetheless cooperative.” (Tyson was never charged with wrongdoing.) “This is crazy that this is how law-abiding tax paying cooperative citizens are treated,” he said.

Chuck’s, a fish house in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, was bustling on the evening of October 26, 2021, when a former Pat Buchanan staffer named K.B. Forbes arrived for what he thought was dinner with Jeff Pitts, who until recently had been CEO of Matrix.

A few months earlier, Joe Perkins, Matrix’s founder, had sued Pitts, his longtime employee and erstwhile protégé. The suit, which had FPL and two of its executives as “fictitious” (unnamed) co-defendants, basically accused Pitts of running his own firm within the firm, stealing Matrix’s clients and cash, operating a clandestine network of dark money groups, and working for FPL without Perkins’s knowledge. (Pitts, in legal filings, denied all of these claims.)

At first, their split had seemed like an amicable, if unexpected, business divorce. “Joe Perkins flew Jeff Pitts down on his plane to meet with me personally to let me know that they had come to an agreement that they were going to part ways, and it was okay,” Silagy said during our 2022 interview. “And then apparently, somewhere along the way, Jeff and Joe got sideways.”

This much was clear: For a decade, Matrix had been the servant of two masters, working both for Southern Co., the nation’s second-largest utility holding company, and NextEra Energy. But as the partners’ acrimony grew, so did the friction between the energy giants. Forbes, who publishes a blog critical of Alabama Power, a Southern Co. subsidiary, told me he had gone to Chuck’s in the hope of obtaining damaging information about Alabama Power’s CEO, Mark Crosswhite. But the vibe was off, and the conversation awkward.

Pitts “was a nervous wreck,” Forbes recalled. “That’s why, on my blog, I call him Jittery Jeff.”

The lawsuit came at a difficult time for Pitts. His new firm, Canopy Partners, less than a year old, was already drawing law enforcement interest. The Miami-Dade Public Corruption Task Force had obtained sworn testimony from Abigail MacIver, one of Pitts’ co-founders, in exchange for limited immunity from prosecution in the ghost candidate scandal. MacIver laid out how she, Pitts, and a contractor had channeled money from a nonprofit operated by Tyson into political committees controlled by Alvarado, Tyson’s associate, by way of a tax-exempt group Pitts controlled. Those committees paid for the ghost candidate mailers.

Reporting from the Sentinel also tied Pitts’ dark-money network to an FPL-funded campaign to defeat a ballot initiative that would have introduced competition into state energy markets and broken FPL’s monopoly. Tyson worked as a pollster on the campaign to counter the initiative. (Neither Pitts nor any Canopy Partners associates have been charged with crimes.)

Pitts is a dapper guy in his early 50s who brings to mind Fred Astaire. He was one of the first employees at Matrix in 1995 and became the director of its Birmingham office in 2009. He enjoys the good life, according to former associates: steak dinners, private flights, expensive wine. But by the time he met with Forbes, his life had grown complicated. “He could not look me in the eye,” Forbes told me, and Pitts wouldn’t stop rubbing the back of his head with his left hand during their dinner: “He was twirling his hair in circles.”

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment.”

Matrix began consulting for NextEra, FPL’s parent, in the early 2010s. Pitts took extraordinary care to conceal his—and FPL’s—involvement in Florida elections. He obscured the money trail by creating multiple layers of subcontractors, shell companies, and 501(c)(4) nonprofits. In one case, he listed the brother of a Matrix subcontractor as the head of several nonprofits in his network, which he registered in faraway states. He preferred in-person conversations to texts or phone calls and hired expensive tax attorneys to advise him on his moves.

FPL was kept apprised of the work. Flight records show that the Matrix company jet made frequent visits to Palm Beach, where the utility is headquartered, and the leaked documents contain lively text and email correspondences between Pitts and its executives. FPL’s public affairs VPs were forwarded drafts of political ads slated to run against candidates they hoped to defeat. The Matrix document trove also included emails between Pitts and Silagy wherein Pitts lists names of dark money nonprofits and political committees to which Silagy could donate. There was also a Matrix invoice seeking reimbursement for incorporating a nonprofit that helped fund the ghost candidate campaigns.

A generation ago, power companies were forced to disclose the names of their consultants and attorneys, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the industry, did away with the rule in 2002. Jon Wellinghoff, FERC’s chairman from 2009 to 2013, told me he regrets not reinstating it. “We didn’t reverse that when I was chairman,” he said, “And we should have. All that should be disclosed. All that should be open to the public and available—information right down to the $100 contribution.”

Pitts didn’t end up staying for dinner at Chuck’s. He got takeout instead, Forbes says, and never forked over the dirt on Alabama Power’s CEO. Neither did Pitts’ attorney, with whom Forbes kept corresponding until he grew too frustrated: “I was livid. I was like, ‘This is a waste of my time.’”

It was opening day of the 2023 session of the Florida Legislature, and the capitol was abuzz. House Speaker Paul Renner presided over his chamber’s opening ceremonies, introducing a dozen former members in attendance. Among them was Frank Artiles, who, despite his legal troubles, had maintained close ties with some of Florida’s Republican power brokers. He would register as a lobbyist that session—for a construction company that paints traffic lanes.

Twenty-nine months had passed since the Fitzpatrick’s election party, and two years since Artiles’ arrest and indictment. Pitts and Perkins had by this time settled their lawsuit, and Silagy had recently taken his leave from FPL.

The utility’s veil of secrecy had been pierced—at least temporarily. Weeks after the meeting between Pitts and Forbes, the first batch of Matrix records arrived at the offices of the Sentinel in an envelope with no return address. The intel consisted of a heavily redacted copy of a nearly 200-page report Perkins had sent to NextEra’s board of directors in November 2021. It detailed Pitts’ allegedly secret work for FPL, efforts ranging from municipal to congressional campaigns, funded by millions in utility cash.

In 2018 alone, the report revealed, Pitts had participated in campaigns against a South Miami mayor who supported rooftop solar, ran ghost candidates against both a Miami-Dade commissioner critical of an FPL nuclear plant and a progressive state Senate candidate in Gainesville, and moved millions of dollars to help defeat Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum, who lost to Ron DeSantis that year by a razor-thin 0.4 percent margin.

Pitts’ work, the report showed, went beyond elections and into acquisitions. In 2019, Pitts had aided in FPL’s failed attempt to acquire the Jacksonville Electric Authority, a city-owned utility whose territory it coveted. His contributions included hiring a private detective to follow a reporter who’d written critically of the proposed sale, running a front group that championed the sale, and enlisting a contractor to offer Garrett Dennis—a Jacksonville councilman seen as unlikely to support the sale—a $250,000-a-year job with the same dark money group, Grow United, that distributed the ghost candidate funds to the other nonprofits. Accepting the position would mean giving up his council seat. (Dennis didn’t bite.)

The leaked records also detailed how Matrix and Pitts had paid at least $900,000 to six pay-to-play news outlets in Florida and Alabama between 2013 and 2020. The outlets, with more than 1.3 million combined monthly viewers, attacked critics and enemies of Southern Co., FPL, and other Matrix clients, though all of them deny that the payments influenced their coverage.

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment,” the attorneys in a federal securities suit filed against NextEra in December 2023 wrote of the revelations. It was one of at least two class-action suits filed against the company since Silagy’s resignation alleging political impropriety.

The proceedings in the shareholder suit have been telling, though perhaps not in the way the plaintiffs would prefer. At a hearing this past May, federal district court Judge Aileen Cannon asked their attorneys to clarify the case against NextEra. “Just so I understand,” she said, “has there been any finding of liability…We talk about, sort of, allegations of wrongdoing and criminality. Can you just pinpoint exactly what would be the crime and has there been any finding of such a crime?”

“Artiles is the victim in this case!” his lawyer told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist.”

Plaintiffs attorney Jeffrey Block responded in the negative.      

“So, I guess, what exactly is wrong that was allegedly done?” Cannon said.      

Her question, albeit unwittingly, broaches a bigger issue, with ramifications far beyond Florida. The IRS and the FEC have generally failed to enforce nonprofit and election laws effectively. At the state level, regulatory boards are easily influenced—and their penalties for breaking the rules, to the extent they are imposed, are often too small to discourage bad behavior.

It is a system that practically invites monopoly power companies and their consultants to exploit every loophole to maximize political leverage and profit—and even, in some cases, to spend money collected from power consumers to lobby for actions that run counter to those ratepayer’s interests. “It’s ludicrous on its face that state-granted monopolies that provide an essential service are allowed to lobby at all. It ought to be unthinkable,” energy expert David Roberts noted during a 2023 discussion of utility corruption on his podcast, Volts.

The notion of a monopoly utility launching a secret effort to field bogus candidates and trick voters would seem all the more unthinkable, and the fact that a federal judge feels compelled to ask what the company is actually alleged to have done wrong is telling.

Back in January, public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen told Cannon he intended to follow the money, although it’s not clear how far up the chain he intends to go. “It’s the money, the payment, that makes this illegal, judge,” he asserted then. The state’s position is, look at all the trouble that they were going through to run…ghost candidates.”

As for Artiles’ alleged ghost candidate activities, “It’s my opinion that this case is politically motivated,” defense attorney Quintero told a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge during a hearing earlier this year. “It’s not just one party that does it. It’s both parties and it’s perfectly legal. Period. End of story.”

The state’s star witness this week is none other than ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who agreed to plead guilty to some charges and testify against Artiles to avoid a possible prison sentence. The defendant’s legal team is attempting to impugn Rodriguez’s character and portray the money that changed hands between the two men as a con. “Artiles is the victim in this case!” Quintero told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist, on loans, on a car Rodriguez sold to him that didn’t exist.”

The jury is expected to decide on the guilt or innocence of Frank Artiles by the end of September. Yet after all the courtroom dramas, feuding consultants, and exposés about the financial subterfuge that enabled the ghost candidates, it remains unclear when, and whether, and to what extent, anyone will ever hold NextEra accountable.

“The system is on trial, because the system enables this kind of conduct,” Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach County state attorney, told me of Artiles’ trial. “In a fully functioning democracy, this kind of scandal would result in real changes to campaign finance laws. But Florida doesn’t have a fully functioning democracy.”

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Liam Fitzpatrick’s was packed on a Tuesday in November, and all eyes in the suburban Orlando, Florida, pub were glued to the TVs behind the bar. Fitzpatrick’s usually had sports on, but this was Election Eve 2020, and Republican state Senate candidate Jason Brodeur watched nervously as the results trickled in. This was his election party. Brodeur’s campaign had spent millions of dollars running him for an open seat against the Democratic nominee, a labor attorney, and the race was neck and neck.

But his backers had a secret weapon. Just before the filing deadline, a substitute teacher named Jestine Iannotti had joined the race as an unaffiliated third-party candidate. A political unknown, she didn’t even campaign. The central Florida district was then carpeted with misleading mailers that appealed to liberal values and voters’ distaste for partisan politics—one included a stock photo that seemed to imply that Iannotti, who is white, is a Black woman. If she siphoned off votes from his Democratic rival, Brodeur stood a better chance.

Iannotti was a “ghost candidate,” one with no hope of winning who runs—or is run—specifically as a spoiler. Ghost candidates are legal in Florida—sort of. Any eligible person can run for public office, but the covert financing of ghost campaigns sometimes runs afoul of even that state’s famously lax election laws. State prosecutors would eventually conclude that Iannotti and another ghost candidate who ran in 2020—along with their political consultants—had broken quite a few. (Brodeur claimed ignorance of the scheme, and has faced no legal action as a result, though a local tax collector on trial for unrelated charges would later testify that Brodeur was well aware of it.)

Also at Fitzpatrick’s that night was then-47-year-old Frank Artiles, a burly, foul-mouthed ex-Marine and former Republican state senator. Artiles, who is Cuban American, had resigned his Senate post in disgrace in 2017 after using racial slurs in front of two Black colleagues during a drunken rant. He, too, was fixated on Brodeur’s returns, as well as the results of an even tighter state Senate race in south Miami-Dade.

The latter contest was a slugfest between one of Florida’s highest-profile Democratic lawmakers, José Javier Rodriguez, and Republican Ileana García, founder of Latinas for Trump. It, too, hinged on a ghost candidate: Alex Rodriguez, a down-on-his-luck salesman of used heavy equipment, whose shared surname with the incumbent was no coincidence. Like Iannotti, Rodriguez hadn’t campaigned. He, too, was boosted by a flood of misleading mailers. 

As the final tallies came in, the mood at Fitzpatrick’s turned electric. Brodeur ended up winning his seat by about 7,600 votes. (Iannotti drew nearly 6,000.) In south Miami-Dade, Garcia, the Republican, edged out incumbent José Rodriguez by fewer than 40 votes. Artiles was jubilant. “That was me!” a partygoer recalls him yelling. “That’s all me!”

At a criminal trial this week in Miami, the prosecution may ask the jury to interpret Artiles’ outburst as an admission of guilt. Four months after the election party, the Miami-Dade state attorney charged him and ghost candidate Rodriquez with multiple campaign finance–related felonies. Among other charges, Artiles stands accused of conspiracy, making excessive campaign contributions, and “false swearing” in connection with voting or elections. If found guilty on all counts, he faces up to five years in prison.

In Central Florida, prosecutors issued a multi-count indictment against Iannotti and the two operatives (Eric Foglesong and Ben Paris, chair of the Seminole County Republican Party) who’d arranged for her to run. (A ghost candidate Artiles had recruited for a third state Senate race—a spa owner whose wife regularly waxed Artiles’ back—was not charged.) In 2022, a jury found Paris guilty of interfering in an election by means of an illegal campaign donation—the state recommended 60 days in jail; the judge gave him a year of probation, community service, and a fine. Foglesong, charged with felony and misdemeanor election crimes, avoided possible jail time by pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges, and Iannotti pleaded no contest last month to a pair of first-degree misdemeanors. Artiles maintains his innocence.

And all of the above might have been just another colorful tale of shady politics in the Sunshine State were it not for a spat between political consultants.

Indeed, after the leaders of Matrix LLC, a high-powered political consulting firm whose CEO helped finance the ghost campaigns, started feuding, the story took on a new life, offering something rarer and more consequential: a glimpse, oddly enough, into the political meddling of one of America’s largest power companies.

The source of the leak was never clear, but as the consultants squabbled, thousands of pages of Matrix’s internal documents made it into the hands of Florida news outlets. The revelations therein, and reporting on discovery materials generated by the various prosecutions, would culminate in the abrupt January 2023 retirement of Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, triggering a single-day, $14 billion drop in the company’s market value.

FPL is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, one of the nation’s largest utility conglomerates in terms of homes and businesses served. And although its parent is a major producer of renewable energy, FPL is among Florida’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters. The leaked documents, in any case, showed that FPL was enmeshed in a covert campaign of media manipulation, surveillance, and what one federal securities lawsuit calls electoral “dirty tricks,” all in the name of maximizing profits.

Investigations by Floodlight and other Florida news outlets would reveal that the ghost candidates were bankrolled with some $730,000 in dark money, $100,000 of which was channeled through a prominent Republican operative into a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that Artiles controlled. (Artiles’ attorney, Frank Quintero, disputes that any of that money ever made it to ghost candidate Rodriguez: “The prosecutor can say whatever the fuck he wants, but the reality is different than what he wants it to be.”) The remaining $630,000 made its way through a daisy chain of opaque nonprofits partially overseen by the CEO of Matrix, which was then working for FPL.

From the utility’s perspective, expanding the state Senate’s Republican majority—by whatever means—would help fulfill its legislative priorities. Those priorities included escaping liability for damages related to power outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma; ousting J.R. Kelly, the state’s long-serving (unsympathetic) consumer utility watchdog; and winning approval from the Senate-confirmed Public Service Commission for Florida’s largest-ever hike in electricity rates. The defeat of Sen. Rodriguez had the added benefit of kneecapping one of the state’s most prominent backers of rooftop solar, which reduces carbon emissions and lowers utility bills—and against which FPL had waged a decade-long counterinsurgency campaign.

FPL, which declined to comment for this article, prevailed on all counts.

The company has steadfastly denied wrongdoing, although it does not dispute hiring Matrix. “They did good work,” then-CEO Silagy told me in June 2022. During the same interview, he admitted to authoring a January 2019 email about Sen. Rodríguez, wherein Silagy ordered his minions “to make his life a living hell”—a directive that was immediately relayed to Matrix.

The utility claims that two outside law firms, whose investigations FPL commissioned but has never made public, have cleared it of election-related liability or wrongdoing, despite reporting that suggests otherwise. The Orlando Sentinel, for example, reported that Silagy sometimes used an email pseudonym (Theodore Hayes) when communicating with Jeff Pitts, then CEO of Matrix. And a 2022 Federal Election Commission complaint accused five nonprofits linked to Pitts of “direct and serious violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act.”

The complaint, dismissed earlier this year after the partisan six-member commission deadlocked on a party-line vote, cites a memo Pitts sent to Silagy laying out how FPL could channel money covertly through a series of nonprofits and, ultimately, a super-PAC, to fund “‘political activities’ on both the state and federal level.” The complaint alleges that “the effect of this scheme would be to illegally hide the identities of the true source or sources of contributions.”  

“Unfortunately, partisan gridlock and dysfunction has become routine at the FEC, which has only opened four investigations this year,” says Stuart McPhail, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the nonprofit that filed the complaint. “That means many complaints, even those for which the FEC’s nonpartisan expert staff recommends an investigation, end in partisan gridlock. That’s exactly what happened with our complaint.”

The scenes to follow are based on thousands of pages of documents and more than 50 interviews with various players. In addition to setting the stage for Artiles’ long-delayed trial, they offer a window into how some utility monopolies have chosen to flex their political power, pushing legal boundaries for financial gain, and sometimes thwarting America’s transition to clean energy in the process.

On a Friday evening in late February 2017, 32 NASCAR race-truck drivers squinted under the Daytona International Speedway’s 2,000-watt lights. Their eyes were fixed on state Sen. Frank Artiles, who sported a suede jacket emblazoned with the NextEra logo. He waved a green flag to kick off the 250-mile race, sponsored by NextEra Energy Resources, another NextEra subsidiary, but just two laps in things went awry—a 17-vehicle pile-up that resulted in one of the trucks getting completely totaled.

Your high school English teacher would call this foreshadowing.

Artiles was then serving his first term in the Florida Senate and chairing its energy committee. That is to say, the elected official who controlled the fate of state bills related to energy and the environment was accepting the red-carpet treatment from a utility holding company that routinely had business before his committee.

Such potential conflicts of interest are not unusual in the utility realm. Investor-owned power companies specialize in charming and lobbying legislators and regulators. A captured regulator might approve a higher profit margin for a power company than an adversarial one would. A friendly legislator is more likely to pass favorable laws. Across the nation, utilities are the most active lobbyists on state environmental bills.

Our system “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines.”

What makes the situation especially irksome is that utilities are not normal companies. The firms that provide gas and electricity and send monthly bills to homeowners and businesses are state-sanctioned monopolies. They don’t make money from selling power per se. Rather, like a waiter with guaranteed tips, their profit margins are pre-determined by regulators based on how much they invest in their infrastructure. The more plants and poles and substations a utility builds, the bigger its guaranteed return, which averages about 10 percent nationwide. (FPL’s have run as high as 11.8 percent.) Politicians and regulators, at least in theory, are supposed to act on behalf of consumers and prevent utilities from running up the tab.

The way the system is set up “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines,” says David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit utility watchdog. “No matter how you slice it,” he adds, “they are among the biggest spenders on political influence generally.”

The numbers are staggering. According to the Institute for Local Self Reliance, an energy think tank, investor-owned utilities have given more than $130 million to federal candidates over the past decade and have spent more than $294 million on state political races between 2014 and 2023.

FPL alone donated at least $42 million to Florida lawmakers between June 2013 and June 2023, according to a Floodlight analysis. And that’s just reported donations. Across the nation, from 2014 to 2020, power companies pumped at least $215 million more into politics via 501(c)(4) nonprofits that don’t have to reveal their donors—which is why these funds are referred to as “dark money.”

Utility influence operations have led to a generational resurgence of fraud and corruption in the sector. A recent Floodlight analysis of three decades of corporate prosecutions and federal lawsuits describes malfeasance that has cost electricity customers at least $6.6 billion over the past 10 years. The costs to the environment and the energy transition are also steep. Utilities in Ohio struck a corrupt bargain with prominent state lawmakers—some of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison—to prop up failing coal and nuclear plants. Utilities in Arizona were investigated by the FBI for using dark money to elect energy regulators who slashed rooftop solar incentives, though no charges have been filed.

Artiles’ Daytona junket didn’t break any laws, but the optics weren’t great. He’d flown in on a private plane that belonged to his campaign treasurer—an FPL lobbyist. The night of the NASCAR race, he took in $10,000 in contributions at a fundraiser in his honor, where he rubbed shoulders with Keanu Reeves. The next day, he visited Disney’s Epcot Center as the guest of John Holley, FPL’s top in-house lobbyist. “It was an honor to be there,” Artiles told the Miami Herald after the news got out. “I’m not going to lie to you. It was cool.”

After returning to Tallahassee, Artiles fast-tracked two bills coveted by FPL.

But like the truck totaled during that second lap at Daytona, the freshman senator’s tenure would be short-lived. About a month after the FPL junket, Artiles got into an argument with two Black fellow senators at a private club near the state Capitol, berating them and using the n-word. The Senate president made Artiles stand and apologize to his colleagues, after which Artiles walked straight out of the chamber and into a gaggle of reporters, shedding his conciliatory tone like a football player doffing sweaty pads. This prompted the legislative Black caucus to demand his expulsion. Artiles resigned two days later.

He was out of the Senate, but not the game. In October 2017, Artiles was invited to a lunch meeting with Ryan Tyson, then a leading Republican operative for Associated Industries of Florida, a powerful trade group to which FPL had donated millions. Tyson, a pollster, had done work on issues critical to FPL, and was executive director of Let’s Preserve the American Dream—a nonprofit that would play a key role in the ghost candidate scandal. Alex Alvarado, Tyson’s protégé, set up the lunch, which Tyson says he does not recall attending. Starting that same month, and continuing into 2021, Artiles would receive $5,000 monthly payments from Tyson for “research services” related to Hispanic voters.

After the 2020 election, Tyson and his group came under the scrutiny of the prosecutors. “We waived all privileges and co-operated with the government in its investigation,” he told me recently. “They couldn’t explain to us what they were looking for, but we were nonetheless cooperative.” (Tyson was never charged with wrongdoing.) “This is crazy that this is how law-abiding tax paying cooperative citizens are treated,” he said.

Chuck’s, a fish house in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, was bustling on the evening of October 26, 2021, when a former Pat Buchanan staffer named K.B. Forbes arrived for what he thought was dinner with Jeff Pitts, who until recently had been CEO of Matrix.

A few months earlier, Joe Perkins, Matrix’s founder, had sued Pitts, his longtime employee and erstwhile protégé. The suit, which had FPL and two of its executives as “fictitious” (unnamed) co-defendants, basically accused Pitts of running his own firm within the firm, stealing Matrix’s clients and cash, operating a clandestine network of dark money groups, and working for FPL without Perkins’s knowledge. (Pitts, in legal filings, denied all of these claims.)

At first, their split had seemed like an amicable, if unexpected, business divorce. “Joe Perkins flew Jeff Pitts down on his plane to meet with me personally to let me know that they had come to an agreement that they were going to part ways, and it was okay,” Silagy said during our 2022 interview. “And then apparently, somewhere along the way, Jeff and Joe got sideways.”

This much was clear: For a decade, Matrix had been the servant of two masters, working both for Southern Co., the nation’s second-largest utility holding company, and NextEra Energy. But as the partners’ acrimony grew, so did the friction between the energy giants. Forbes, who publishes a blog critical of Alabama Power, a Southern Co. subsidiary, told me he had gone to Chuck’s in the hope of obtaining damaging information about Alabama Power’s CEO, Mark Crosswhite. But the vibe was off, and the conversation awkward.

Pitts “was a nervous wreck,” Forbes recalled. “That’s why, on my blog, I call him Jittery Jeff.”

The lawsuit came at a difficult time for Pitts. His new firm, Canopy Partners, less than a year old, was already drawing law enforcement interest. The Miami-Dade Public Corruption Task Force had obtained sworn testimony from Abigail MacIver, one of Pitts’ co-founders, in exchange for limited immunity from prosecution in the ghost candidate scandal. MacIver laid out how she, Pitts, and a contractor had channeled money from a nonprofit operated by Tyson into political committees controlled by Alvarado, Tyson’s associate, by way of a tax-exempt group Pitts controlled. Those committees paid for the ghost candidate mailers.

Reporting from the Sentinel also tied Pitts’ dark-money network to an FPL-funded campaign to defeat a ballot initiative that would have introduced competition into state energy markets and broken FPL’s monopoly. Tyson worked as a pollster on the campaign to counter the initiative. (Neither Pitts nor any Canopy Partners associates have been charged with crimes.)

Pitts is a dapper guy in his early 50s who brings to mind Fred Astaire. He was one of the first employees at Matrix in 1995 and became the director of its Birmingham office in 2009. He enjoys the good life, according to former associates: steak dinners, private flights, expensive wine. But by the time he met with Forbes, his life had grown complicated. “He could not look me in the eye,” Forbes told me, and Pitts wouldn’t stop rubbing the back of his head with his left hand during their dinner: “He was twirling his hair in circles.”

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment.”

Matrix began consulting for NextEra, FPL’s parent, in the early 2010s. Pitts took extraordinary care to conceal his—and FPL’s—involvement in Florida elections. He obscured the money trail by creating multiple layers of subcontractors, shell companies, and 501(c)(4) nonprofits. In one case, he listed the brother of a Matrix subcontractor as the head of several nonprofits in his network, which he registered in faraway states. He preferred in-person conversations to texts or phone calls and hired expensive tax attorneys to advise him on his moves.

FPL was kept apprised of the work. Flight records show that the Matrix company jet made frequent visits to Palm Beach, where the utility is headquartered, and the leaked documents contain lively text and email correspondences between Pitts and its executives. FPL’s public affairs VPs were forwarded drafts of political ads slated to run against candidates they hoped to defeat. The Matrix document trove also included emails between Pitts and Silagy wherein Pitts lists names of dark money nonprofits and political committees to which Silagy could donate. There was also a Matrix invoice seeking reimbursement for incorporating a nonprofit that helped fund the ghost candidate campaigns.

A generation ago, power companies were forced to disclose the names of their consultants and attorneys, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the industry, did away with the rule in 2002. Jon Wellinghoff, FERC’s chairman from 2009 to 2013, told me he regrets not reinstating it. “We didn’t reverse that when I was chairman,” he said, “And we should have. All that should be disclosed. All that should be open to the public and available—information right down to the $100 contribution.”

Pitts didn’t end up staying for dinner at Chuck’s. He got takeout instead, Forbes says, and never forked over the dirt on Alabama Power’s CEO. Neither did Pitts’ attorney, with whom Forbes kept corresponding until he grew too frustrated: “I was livid. I was like, ‘This is a waste of my time.’”

It was opening day of the 2023 session of the Florida Legislature, and the capitol was abuzz. House Speaker Paul Renner presided over his chamber’s opening ceremonies, introducing a dozen former members in attendance. Among them was Frank Artiles, who, despite his legal troubles, had maintained close ties with some of Florida’s Republican power brokers. He would register as a lobbyist that session—for a construction company that paints traffic lanes.

Twenty-nine months had passed since the Fitzpatrick’s election party, and two years since Artiles’ arrest and indictment. Pitts and Perkins had by this time settled their lawsuit, and Silagy had recently taken his leave from FPL.

The utility’s veil of secrecy had been pierced—at least temporarily. Weeks after the meeting between Pitts and Forbes, the first batch of Matrix records arrived at the offices of the Sentinel in an envelope with no return address. The intel consisted of a heavily redacted copy of a nearly 200-page report Perkins had sent to NextEra’s board of directors in November 2021. It detailed Pitts’ allegedly secret work for FPL, efforts ranging from municipal to congressional campaigns, funded by millions in utility cash.

In 2018 alone, the report revealed, Pitts had participated in campaigns against a South Miami mayor who supported rooftop solar, ran ghost candidates against both a Miami-Dade commissioner critical of an FPL nuclear plant and a progressive state Senate candidate in Gainesville, and moved millions of dollars to help defeat Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum, who lost to Ron DeSantis that year by a razor-thin 0.4 percent margin.

Pitts’ work, the report showed, went beyond elections and into acquisitions. In 2019, Pitts had aided in FPL’s failed attempt to acquire the Jacksonville Electric Authority, a city-owned utility whose territory it coveted. His contributions included hiring a private detective to follow a reporter who’d written critically of the proposed sale, running a front group that championed the sale, and enlisting a contractor to offer Garrett Dennis—a Jacksonville councilman seen as unlikely to support the sale—a $250,000-a-year job with the same dark money group, Grow United, that distributed the ghost candidate funds to the other nonprofits. Accepting the position would mean giving up his council seat. (Dennis didn’t bite.)

The leaked records also detailed how Matrix and Pitts had paid at least $900,000 to six pay-to-play news outlets in Florida and Alabama between 2013 and 2020. The outlets, with more than 1.3 million combined monthly viewers, attacked critics and enemies of Southern Co., FPL, and other Matrix clients, though all of them deny that the payments influenced their coverage.

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment,” the attorneys in a federal securities suit filed against NextEra in December 2023 wrote of the revelations. It was one of at least two class-action suits filed against the company since Silagy’s resignation alleging political impropriety.

The proceedings in the shareholder suit have been telling, though perhaps not in the way the plaintiffs would prefer. At a hearing this past May, federal district court Judge Aileen Cannon asked their attorneys to clarify the case against NextEra. “Just so I understand,” she said, “has there been any finding of liability…We talk about, sort of, allegations of wrongdoing and criminality. Can you just pinpoint exactly what would be the crime and has there been any finding of such a crime?”

“Artiles is the victim in this case!” his lawyer told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist.”

Plaintiffs attorney Jeffrey Block responded in the negative.      

“So, I guess, what exactly is wrong that was allegedly done?” Cannon said.      

Her question, albeit unwittingly, broaches a bigger issue, with ramifications far beyond Florida. The IRS and the FEC have generally failed to enforce nonprofit and election laws effectively. At the state level, regulatory boards are easily influenced—and their penalties for breaking the rules, to the extent they are imposed, are often too small to discourage bad behavior.

It is a system that practically invites monopoly power companies and their consultants to exploit every loophole to maximize political leverage and profit—and even, in some cases, to spend money collected from power consumers to lobby for actions that run counter to those ratepayer’s interests. “It’s ludicrous on its face that state-granted monopolies that provide an essential service are allowed to lobby at all. It ought to be unthinkable,” energy expert David Roberts noted during a 2023 discussion of utility corruption on his podcast, Volts.

The notion of a monopoly utility launching a secret effort to field bogus candidates and trick voters would seem all the more unthinkable, and the fact that a federal judge feels compelled to ask what the company is actually alleged to have done wrong is telling.

Back in January, public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen told Cannon he intended to follow the money, although it’s not clear how far up the chain he intends to go. “It’s the money, the payment, that makes this illegal, judge,” he asserted then. The state’s position is, look at all the trouble that they were going through to run…ghost candidates.”

As for Artiles’ alleged ghost candidate activities, “It’s my opinion that this case is politically motivated,” defense attorney Quintero told a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge during a hearing earlier this year. “It’s not just one party that does it. It’s both parties and it’s perfectly legal. Period. End of story.”

The state’s star witness this week is none other than ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who agreed to plead guilty to some charges and testify against Artiles to avoid a possible prison sentence. The defendant’s legal team is attempting to impugn Rodriguez’s character and portray the money that changed hands between the two men as a con. “Artiles is the victim in this case!” Quintero told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist, on loans, on a car Rodriguez sold to him that didn’t exist.”

The jury is expected to decide on the guilt or innocence of Frank Artiles by the end of September. Yet after all the courtroom dramas, feuding consultants, and exposés about the financial subterfuge that enabled the ghost candidates, it remains unclear when, and whether, and to what extent, anyone will ever hold NextEra accountable.

“The system is on trial, because the system enables this kind of conduct,” Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach County state attorney, told me of Artiles’ trial. “In a fully functioning democracy, this kind of scandal would result in real changes to campaign finance laws. But Florida doesn’t have a fully functioning democracy.”

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America.

For decades, McLean Bible Church has served as the place of worship for many of DC’s Republican elite. The sprawling evangelical megachurch in Vienna, Virginia, boasts a roster of former parishioners that includes everyone from Ken Starr to Mike Pence. It’s where Donald Trump once dropped in for a brief prayer after a round of golf.

McLean Bible is also where, in November 2017, a senior pastor named Dale Sutherland formed a nonprofit called Act2Impact. In those days, the organization was described in state records as an “auxiliary” of the church, with a mission to “preach the gospel” and “conduct evangelistic and humanitarian outreach.”

But that mission was short-lived.

Two years later, Sutherland—who had once been an undercover narcotics officer in DC—left McLean Bible and filed papers to rename Act2Impact. It became the Constitutional Defense Fund (CDF), which would “promote and secure” constitutional rights. “We aim to defend and strengthen those rights through methods that will include litigation and other means,” the filing stated. New directors joined, replacing church elders. One was Joseph Abdalla, a former cop who’d been Sutherland’s partner.

Around this time, Sutherland also leaned into a new persona, adopting the Undercover Pastor as his brand and moniker. “Buying cocaine and preaching Jesus. A weird combo,” notes his website, which touted a newsletter—“get biblical wisdom delivered to your inbox”—and YouTube channel. “I used to lock people up,” he likes to say, “now I’m trying to set people free.”

Sutherland is much less public about the CDF, which in the half-decade since its rechristening has evolved from spreading the good news to facilitating a far-reaching, multimillion-dollar legal campaign to dismantle America’s gun laws. From 2020 to 2022, the CDF collected $12 million in cash and funneled nearly $10 million to two connected gun rights groups and a DC law firm, Cooper & Kirk, which together have filed at least 21 lawsuits since 2020 that challenged gun restrictions. These lawsuits, aimed at getting an eventual Supreme Court hearing, concern bans on AR-15-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, as well as restrictions on young adults buying and carrying handguns. During its next term, which begins in October, the court will hear one of the suits, a challenge to the government’s ability to check the spread of home-produced, unserialized “ghost guns.”

The CDF paid Cooper & Kirk more than $8 million between 2020 and 2022. The fund also made payments to the Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Foundation (an offshoot of the Firearms Policy Coalition), which are the plaintiffs, individually or together, in every one of the 21 lawsuits the operation is behind.

The CDF’s money came via Donors Trust, a pass-through fund founded in 1999 with the aim of “safeguarding the intent of libertarian and conservative” philanthropists who seek to channel their wealth into right-wing causes. The trust has more than $1 billion in assets and is not legally required to identify its donors.

In short: An anonymous funder or funders is bankrolling a legal attack aimed at providing the conservative majority on the Supreme Court an opportunity to wipe out America’s firearms laws. It’s akin to the Christian right’s abortion playbook but for guns.

It’s akin to the Christian right’s abortion playbook but for guns.

“It’s about as far from a bottom-up, grassroots operation as possible,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and vice president of Giffords Law Center, who has spent a decade tangling in court with gun rights interests. Skaggs said that in terms of its ambition and scale, the dark money operation is unlike any litigation funding arrangement he’s seen.

The motives of many of the players in this drama—gun rights advocates and the conservative lawyers who work for them—are obvious. But Sutherland is more of a mystery. People who have known him for years say they’ve never heard him talk about the Second Amendment or state a position on the gun debate.

Over the past two years, I have tried to piece together this network and chart its workings. It’s an effort that has involved reading many thousands of pages of financial filings, depositions, and court records. I’ve done dozens of interviews and knocked on the same doors again and again, trying to figure out how an undercover pastor became the unlikely middleman for a covertly funded operation to abolish gun laws. Here’s what I’ve learned.

The Firm

In August 2019, before he stepped on a podium in Colonial Williamsburg, Charles Cooper was introduced as a “legend” of the conservative legal world. He began by warming up the crowd at the Convention of States Project leadership summit, which brings together people who want to amend the Constitution to eliminate what they consider ambiguous language that has enabled liberal advances. “Are there any freedom-loving, anti-communist patriots in this room?” The audience clapped and cheered. “Do any of you cling to your Bibles and your guns?”

“Are there any freedom-loving, anti-communist patriots in this room? Do any of you cling to your Bibles and your guns?”

The day before, Cooper had lost his decades-long gig as the National Rifle Association’s outside counsel. As details of financial abuses became public many had rallied around then-CEO Wayne LaPierre. Cooper did not and was purged.

Before representing the NRA, Cooper led the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president and executive agencies. Cooper’s Reagan-era DOJ opinions—for instance, one finding that employers could refuse to hire those with AIDS—burnished his reputation as a polished champion of a strident conservatism. Cooper tapped Samuel Alito to be his deputy and, two decades later, would guide him through the Supreme Court confirmation process. By then, Cooper had founded Cooper & Kirk, which became known as the conservative movement’s prestige advocate. It hired hard-right zealots from elite law schools, including Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Noel Francisco, who would become Trump’s solicitor general. Cooper defended Proposition 8, California’s ban on gay marriage, and represented fellow Alabaman Jeff Sessions when the then-attorney general was under scrutiny for his contacts with Russian officials in 2016.

Cooper’s Williamsburg speech was titled, “The Real Threat to the Second Amendment.” He described how his work had contributed to split circuit court rulings on whether people have a right to carry guns outside the home for self-defense. A case that would resolve that question, he noted, was before the Supreme Court.

Cooper was referring to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which challenged a New York law that required applicants for concealed carry permits to demonstrate a heightened need for protection. At the time, Cooper & Kirk was representing the Bruen plaintiffs. Although the firm did not argue the case before the Supreme Court—that was handed off to star SCOTUS advocate Paul Clement—invoices show that in April 2021, the month the justices agreed to hear Bruen, Cooper & Kirk managing partner David H. Thompson conferred with lead attorneys on the case about an “amicus panel,” a body of subject experts that advises on litigation strategy.

CDF money went to attorneys and advocacy groups that filed friend of the court briefs backing the plaintiffs. Such filings, known as amicus briefs, are integral to legal strategy in appellate litigation and are often cited by higher courts in decisions. Thompson filed an amicus brief in Bruen on behalf of the Second Amendment Foundation. And another partner at the firm, John D. Ohlendorf, did so on behalf of J. Joel Alicea, himself a Cooper & Kirk attorney identified in the brief only as a professor at Catholic University. The CDF-funded Firearms Policy Foundation filed an amicus brief as well. So did the archconservative Claremont Institute, which got a $105,000 CDF grant in 2021 to support gun rights. John C. Eastman—the lawyer who helped rally Trump’s faithful before they stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and is now under indictment in Georgia and Arizona for attempting to subvert the 2020 election—wrote the Claremont brief. (Eastman’s law license has been temporarily suspended in California and DC.)

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Bruen was momentous. Conservative justices not only struck down New York’s law, but also established a new test for the constitutionality of all gun restrictions. No longer should courts weigh the government’s interest in reducing violence or promoting public safety against the right to bear arms, the majority said. Rather, the constitutionality of gun laws should depend on whether they’re similar enough to restrictions in place when the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, or when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, points at which the original meaning and public understanding of the Second Amendment are best discerned.

Lower courts have since seen a surge in challenges to firearms restrictions, ruling on an average of one a day in the year after the decision, according to an analysis by Jacob D. Charles, a scholar at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. Although courts have diverged when applying the standard, thanks to Bruen, gun laws are being struck down at an unprecedented clip. “We are more excited than ever about the future,” Brandon Combs, director of the Firearms Policy Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition, declared after the Bruen ruling. “Indeed, FPC is already working with the exceptional litigators at Cooper & Kirk—truly the best in the space—on the largest Second Amendment litigation program in the country.”

The Plaintiff

Of course, before Cooper & Kirk can get involved, a plaintiff is needed. That’s where the Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition come in. They not only act as plaintiffs, but they also recruit individual plaintiffs, someone who can claim standing—a direct injury from the law that’s being challenged.

The Second Amendment Foundation has always been involved in litigation, and in 2013, it helped create the Firearms Policy Coalition, which is similarly focused on challenging gun laws in court. Since Trump appointees have made the composition of the Supreme Court so favorable and the foundation began to receive CDF funds in 2020, the groups have become juggernauts. In the three years prior to 2020, a public database of federal lawsuits identifies them, alone or together, as plaintiffs in 28 actions; in the three subsequent years, that number jumps to 89. “We want to get a case before the Supreme Court,” Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb told journalist Stephen Gutowski last year. “And the quicker these cases move, the better for gun ownership and for gun rights.”

“We want to get a case before the Supreme Court. And the quicker these cases move, the better for gun ownership and for gun rights.”

Gottlieb created the Second Amendment Foundation and another group at the vanguard of conservative crusades, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, back in the early 1970s. He is known for direct-mail and marketing savvy, and for cashing in on right-wing causes through private companies that have business arrangements with his advocacy groups. In 1984, he pleaded guilty to felony tax fraud and was sentenced to a year in prison, which he served largely on work release. (More recently, the attorney general of Washington state investigated Gottlieb, who filed a lawsuit against the office alleging the inquiry into his activities was politically motivated.)

Gottlieb first gained public notice in the late 1980s as an architect of the Wise Use movement, which championed the exploitation of natural resources and an end to environmentalism. Backlash to federal control of land in Western states and encroachment of environmental regulation fueled a groundswell. “I’ve never seen anything pay out as quickly as this whole Wise Use thing has done,” Gottlieb said back then. “It touches the same kind of anger as the gun stuff, and not only generates a higher rate of return, but also a higher average dollar donation. My gun stuff runs about $18. The Wise Use stuff breaks $40.” When news stories linked Wise Use to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, Gottlieb described them as “overplayed.” In 2023, he headlined the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, an event hosted by the Rod of Iron Ministries, which is led by a son of Moon. The MAGA-allied church glorifies AR-15-style rifles—the type of gun used in the recent attempt to assassinate Trump—seeing in them the biblical “rod of iron,” Christ’s prophesied instrument of dominion at Armageddon.

In November 2022, two years after the CDF operation began, Gottlieb gave a deposition as part of a challenge to an Illinois law that prohibits young adults from carrying a gun in public. When I first read the deposition in early 2023, many questions I’d had were answered. In it, Gottlieb testified that an anonymous funder was supporting the case by paying his counsel, Cooper & Kirk. He said the firm had given him a statement outlining how much money the person had spent on what he estimated to be a dozen foundation lawsuits underway in 2021. (Court records confirm his assessment.)

When asked whether he knew who was paying Cooper & Kirk, Gottlieb testified, “I wish I did.”

That remark alarms some legal ethicists, who argue that rules of professional responsibility should be interpreted as requiring that a client know who is paying their counsel before consenting to representation. “He’s either just lying or the firm is delinquent in getting informed consent,” said Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who specializes in legal ethics and firearms regulation.

In response to written questions, Gottlieb said that his answers in the deposition were “accurate” and that “our attorneys did not fail to get our informed consent, it was given.” Outside funding arrangements can raise questions about whether the financial backer or plaintiff is really in charge, but Gottlieb said, “merely because a third-party may have paid for some services rendered, SAF retains control over all legal direction, strategy, and settlement authority, which is wholly ethical.”   

Gottlieb is not the operation’s only beneficiary who seems to be unaware of the source of the largesse. In 2021, the CDF paid Gary Kleck, a professor emeritus of criminology at Florida State University whose work has been touted by gun interests for decades, $6,900, according to an IRS filing. When I emailed him, Kleck said the money was a consulting fee from Cooper & Kirk for work he’d done on Bruen. “I have no idea what the Constitutional Defense Fund is,” he said, “and had never heard of it before you contacted me.”

The Professor

Even when they go before a court inclined to overturn gun laws, the lawyers and plaintiffs need research to bolster their case. Enter Georgetown assistant professor William English, who in 2021 received a $58,750 CDF grant and the same year filed a key brief supporting the Bruen plaintiffs.

Before arriving at Georgetown in 2016, English, a political economist, was research director at Harvard University’s Edward J. Safra Center for Ethics. (While at Harvard, he also founded the Abigail Adams Institute, whose mission is “reviving traditional humanities education”—i.e., the Western canon. In 2022, the CDF gave the institute a $23,000 grant for “constitutional research.”)

In June, the New York Times ran a profile of English in which the existence of a dark money drive to strike down gun laws being run through the CDF was first revealed. The Times detailed how English’s Bruen brief was filed jointly with the Center for Human Liberty—another part of Gottlieb’s operation that was incorporated in Nevada two months before English filed his brief. In it, English argued that, based on his own research that had not been peer-reviewed, there was no connection between right-to-carry laws, increased numbers of gun carry permits, and violent crime. The brief was prepared by a Manhattan attorney, Edward Paltzik, whose firm received $80,000 from the CDF in 2021.

English’s work suited the needs of the Bruen plaintiffs perfectly. Their counsel cited it during oral arguments, and Charles Cooper’s pal, Alito, did so in a concurring opinion. An update English later published concluded that AR-15-style rifles are in “common use,” a finding central to the gun movement’s legal advocacy post-Bruen. Since the ruling, gun interests have cited English’s work in dozens of motions and pleadings in cases nationwide.

Academics on both sides of the gun debate have found defects in English’s work. In a January 2023 deposition in an Oregon case, Kleck, the Florida State professor, said English’s survey can’t be relied on. “He’s vague about exactly how he developed his sample,” Kleck said. “And there is nothing in his report to contradict the assumption that what he had was a self-selected sample.”

I’d been trying to get English and Georgetown to respond to questions about his research since the Bruen ruling came down. In December 2022, I paid a visit to the gated community where Georgetown President John DeGioia lived. After that, the university’s communications office finally responded by email, stating: “Georgetown respects and supports academic freedom, including the right of its faculty members to conduct independent research. The University’s Institutional Review Board reviewed this study before the survey began, and the survey costs were supported by an external grant that did not flow through the University.”

The tax ID number that the CDF reported to the IRS in conjunction with English’s grant is Georgetown’s. Asked recently to clarify the meaning of “did not flow through the university” and whether it had a position on English’s failure to divulge who funded his work, a Georgetown spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the university is “unable to identify any record of Constitutional Defense Fund funds flowing through Georgetown and is uncertain why the University’s tax identification number appears in CDF’s records. Georgetown faculty members have academic freedom to conduct independent research projects. The views of faculty members are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Georgetown University.”

On June 26, English published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he defended his work, bashed the New York Times, and characterized attempts by me and other reporters to get answers from him as “harassment.” English wrote that the Times “and other outlets are signaling that they will cancel academics who state inconvenient facts…Those of us who want to foster an evidence-based public-policy discourse should reject these tactics, and courts should take note of them.”

The Middleman

Lawyers and academics all need to be paid, which brings us back to the Undercover Pastor.

Sutherland likes to tout his time with the DC police, but not all of his undercover work ended smoothly. In one early 1990s case, Sutherland and Abdalla—now on the board of the CDF—handled an informant named Arvell “Pork Chop” Williams, who was shot 16 times and killed. When federal prosecutors tried members of the drug crew suspected in the killing, it emerged that Williams had been allowed to continue making street buys for Sutherland, who was posing as a Georgetown University construction worker seeking crack, despite the presence of the “white guy” causing dealers unease, according to court transcripts. At trial, evidence went missing, including a pager in Sutherland’s possession that defense attorneys argued could shed light on the killing and related crimes. “I am going to get the chief of police and the United States attorney in here and read them the riot act,” the judge said at one point. “To lose evidence of various kinds day after day is just not satisfactory.” Prosecutors dropped the murder charge but obtained drug conspiracy convictions against the defendants.

After Sutherland left the DC police force in 2013, his role at McLean Bible, where he’d long held staff positions, grew. In 2016, he began talks with the Southern Baptist Convention on a partnership to “plant” churches in the DC region. Sutherland founded an entity called New City Network, an arm of McLean Bible, to carry out the work. Concerned that the partnership violated McLean’s constitution, which requires the church to remain unaffiliated with denominations, a group of members filed suit against McLean in 2022.

The legal battle revealed a complex series of money transfers totaling more than $7 million between McLean, the convention, and New City Network. The plaintiffs felt that records and testimony produced in their suit demonstrated that the partnership had indeed violated McLean’s constitution and dropped their case last year. In a letter summarizing the litigation, however, their attorney made clear that questions remain: “Current and former church leaders deposed could not explain the reasons for this unorthodox payment structure, or state with confidence where the money went specifically.” A church webpage allows that “financial transactions for the church planting were sometimes confusing,” but says an independent audit accounted for the money spent. 

“Current and former church leaders deposed could not explain the reasons for this unorthodox payment structure, or state with confidence where the money went specifically.”

Sutherland was among those deposed. He said that he’d left McLean Bible and his role leading New City Network in May 2019. He was unable to name any churches the network had started, save for one in Falls Church, Virginia, where he and his son-in-law now preach. “For Heaven’s sake,” Sutherland said. “I can picture all the pastors in my head. I just can’t think of the names they gave their churches. Boy oh boy.”

One of the plaintiffs in that suit, Jeremiah Burke, said Sutherland’s limited recall was an act. “He repeatedly recounts, in his podcast and on his Instagram page, in vivid detail, events from 20 and 30 years ago with absolute precision, events in which he is the hero,” Burke said. “However, in his deposition, having sworn under oath to tell the truth, Dale somehow couldn’t call to mind details of significant events from the recent past.”

One name that Sutherland could not recall in his September 2023 deposition was Veritas Church in DC’s Georgetown neighborhood, which had gotten New City funds. Sutherland became interim pastor of Veritas in 2020 and renamed the church City Light, the same name used by the church in Virginia that he and his son-in-law lead. In 2020 and 2021, IRS disclosures for the CDF listed City Light’s Georgetown location as the CDF address. When I visited last year, I found a largely vacant office building, save for one floor occupied by the Embassy of the Republic of South Sudan, and no sign of a church or the CDF.

A former McLean Bible elder, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal church matters, described Sutherland as “kind-hearted” and a “warrior for the Lord,” but also “deceptive.” During the church planting drive, he said, Sutherland “did things the way he wanted to, he just kind of ran rogue.” The elder said Sutherland “is a pretty good talker, he can sell pretty well,” and would “cuddle up next to” the congregation’s big donors.

As Sutherland left McLean Bible and established the CDF, he began to collect more money from his array of nonprofits, including Code 3 Association, whose stated goal is better relations between police and the public. (Abdalla is a director there, too.) In 2020, these nonprofits—the CDF, Code 3, and Boost Others, Inc.—paid Sutherland and his private company, Code 3 Consulting, more than $200,000. Over the next two years, Sutherland collected more than $700,000 from his nonprofits. He also began flipping DC properties, which he sometimes bought from the estates of the recently deceased or those in bankruptcy. From 2020 through early 2023, records show, he bought at least a dozen properties valued at $7 million and sold them for more than $11 million.

In short, Sutherland has been awash in cash since he filed paperwork to create the CDF. In one sense, he’s an odd middleman. People who know him can’t recall Sutherland expressing support for scuttling gun laws. “I never heard him talk about the Second Amendment or gun rights,” said the former McLean elder. “I never did, nope, and I was with him a lot.”

“I never heard him talk about the Second Amendment or gun rights. I never did, nope, and I was with him a lot.”

But there are connections that lead back to McLean Bible. In a 2023 interview, Thompson, the Cooper & Kirk managing partner who has overseen much of the firm’s Second Amendment work, praised the church that was his spiritual home for two decades. “I grew up Episcopalian,” said Thompson, who did not respond to written questions for this story, “and about 20 years ago, I became a born-again Christian and went to McLean Bible Church.”

Twice in the last year, I knocked on the door of Sutherland’s home. I got no response and left a business card. Attempts to reach him by phone failed. Then, in mid-June, he answered. I asked him to explain how he’d come to be running money through the CDF to Cooper & Kirk. “Sir, I am in the car with my grandson,” Sutherland said, “and I am not talking.”

The Dark Money

In July 2016, a young man in Washington state, angry and jealous after a break-up, bought an AR-15-style rifle and a 30-round magazine. A week later, he bought another 30-round magazine, then shot and killed three people, including his ex-girlfriend, at a house party. He later blamed his actions in part on easy access to guns. The killings prompted the state legislature to enact a ban on high-capacity magazines and AR-15-style rifles. The Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition, as co-plaintiffs, filed suits in 2022 and 2023 to strike down the bans. Cooper & Kirk is their counsel in the case targeting the magazine capacity ban. English’s survey findings were cited by the plaintiffs in both cases. (As the Times reported, however, the plaintiffs subsequently agreed not to rely on English’s work “in any respect” after the state sought to subpoena information from English in the AR-15 case regarding the development of his survey.) Both cases are pending in federal district court in Washington state.

Autumn Snider’s son, 19-year-old Jake Long, was the first to be shot and killed at the party. Snider said those with the means to fund litigation meant to impact public policy should be free to do so—as long as they do so openly. “You have the obligation to reveal who you are and should have the confidence to provide transparency to the public,” Snider said. “If you can’t be forthcoming with who you are, that is a red flag.”

Defenders of using dark money to support litigation liken the practice to anonymous political speech, which enjoys First Amendment protection. But such arguments have limits, said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA School of Law who has written a book on the gun debate. “First Amendment rights are mitigated by the need to ensure the integrity of the judicial system,” Winkler said. “We generally don’t allow parties in a case to be anonymous.”

Anonymous funding arrangements, which are not uncommon in the realm of impact litigation, effectively allow an “end run” around judicial ethics safeguards. “How do you know whether there is any impropriety, any influence peddling?” Winkler said. “It’s fundamentally problematic.”

Seth Endo, an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law, said the debate over disclosing the identity of anonymous funders involves fundamental questions about the role of courts. If courts are neutral arbiters of the rights and responsibilities of disputing parties, as many who work in them like to contend, then it’s easy to argue that disclosure is irrelevant. However, if courts are not detached umpires but are themselves political agents that drive social change, then the public has a strong interest in knowing who’s enabling litigation, Endo said.

Given Cooper & Kirk’s ties to deep-pocketed conservatives who specialize in waging ideological battles through courts, there are any number of suspects who may be routing millions of dollars through Donors Trust to Sutherland’s CDF—and on to the advocacy groups and their lawyers.

Donors Trust is a pass-through that effectively conceals the identities of individuals and advocacy groups backing right-wing causes. (On the political left, organizations like the Tides Foundation do the same.) Those who give to Donors Trust can say how they’d like their money to be spent, but they don’t have the final word. In exchange for giving up that control, they get up-front tax benefits. Prominent funders and architects of the modern conservative movement, including the Kochs, the Bradley Foundation, and hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer, have all moved money through Donors Trust. 

In 2013 and 2014, Mercer’s foundation gave a total of $800,000 to Gottlieb’s Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, which was at its zenith when Gottlieb was pushing his Wise Use agenda. Mercer is a gun lover and Trump devotee. From 2020 to 2022, Mercer’s foundation gave more than $56 million to Donors Trust. Mercer’s daughter Rebekah, who has spearheaded her family’s philanthropic and political efforts, did not respond to emailed questions.

By the end of 2022, the last year for which IRS filings are public, Sutherland’s fund had $1.6 million on hand. The pastor has recently formed other nonprofits with similar names, including an outfit called the Constitutional Freedom Fund, incorporated in Virginia in 2022, and the Foundation for Constitutional Freedom, established in Utah in December 2023. Details on their activities have yet to be disclosed.

Recently, a French film director named David André unveiled a documentary series on Sutherland called Dale L’Infiltré, or Dale Undercover. A blurb on a promotional video reads, “Dale Sutherland, a young pastor-police officer, will become a master in the art of infiltration, filming criminals without their knowledge and using fictitious identities: Italian mafia boss, pimp, drug trafficker, rap producer.” Sutherland also recently started a new podcast: Cops, Criminals, and Christ.

In the fall, Cooper & Kirk is slated to represent the Firearms Policy Coalition, which is joined by the Second Amendment Foundation before the Supreme Court in the ghost gun case. Given the court’s current political lean, the gun rights advocates might well prevail. Other cases, which could result in AR-15-style rifle and high-capacity magazine bans being ruled unconstitutional, are wending their way through lower courts, though the funding source for this entire dark money operation remains shrouded from the public.

Update, July 30: This story has been updated to further detail Alan Gottlieb’s involvement with the criminal justice system.

Campaign finance disclosures are made public too ridiculously slowly to be of much use for real-time political analysis, but they do reveal some general trends in terms of who supports whom, and how rich they are.

I previously reported that, according to Federal Election Commission data through May 1—before Donald Trump’s criminal conviction, Biden’s disastrous debate performance, or Saturday’s assassination attempt—Trump was getting less than one-third of his contributions from small donors (people who gave less than $200), whereas the 100 top donors (all very, very rich) favored Republicans by a margin of 3 to 1.

That hasn’t changed per the latest data, most of which only gets us through May 31—which is still before all of the mayhem mentioned above. With the new numbers, the Top 100 still favor Republican groups and candidates, in dollars given, by a nearly 3-to-1 margin.

One notable difference involved a reshuffling among the Top 5, who have given overwhelmingly to Republicans and their causes. The lead position in the last round was held by billionaire couple Janine and Jeffrey Yass—he’s a cofounder of Susquehanna International Group (an investment firm) and a major TikTok investor. From his contribution history, it’s clear that Yass wasn’t much of a Trump supporter, though Susquehanna owned a stake in the special purpose acquisition company that merged with Trump Media.

The latest (and likely current, though not for long) top donor is a major Trump backer. That’s banking dynasty heir Timothy Mellon—a “reclusive plutocrat,” as independent journalist Judd Legum wrote in his Popular Information Substack, who over the past 12 months has given $25 million to American Values 2024, a Super PAC supporting Robert Kennedy, Jr. and then turned around and donated a whopping $50 million to the Trump Super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. the day after a jury found the former president guilty of 34 felonies.

At last count, the Top 100 had doled out $933.5 million, only 22 percent of which went to solidly Democratic candidates and causes.

In all, this election cycle, Mellon has given more than $115 million to Republicans, including $76.5 million to MAGA Inc. He also, as Legum noted, has donated $4 million to Sentinel Action Fund, a Super PAC created by Heritage Action, a subsidiary of the Heritage Foundation, whose controversial Project 2025 was created as more or less a blueprint for a second Trump term—though Trump, incredibly, claims no knowledge of it.

Moreover, in 2020, Mellon gave $20 million to America First Action, a Super PAC run by America First Inc., a nonprofit that claims in its IRS filings it is “bipartisan,” but listed as its board chair Linda McMahon. That’s the WWE mogul Trump appointed to run his Small Business Administration. Linda and her husband, Vince McMahon, are No. 17 on the Top 100 donors list, giving more than $11 million so far to Republican candidates and causes during the current election cycle. Nonpartisan indeed.

At last count, the Top 100 had doled out a total of $933.5 million to candidates, party committees, and outside groups. Only 22 percent of it went to solidly Democratic candidates and causes, while 64 percent went to solidly Republican candidates and causes.

President Joe Biden’s campaign committee raised a total of about $231 million, of which 42 percent came from small donors giving less than $200. Trump’s campaign committee reported about $196 million in donations, 31 percent from under-$200 donors. The Trump campaign also reported about $193 million from outside groups, while the Biden campaign reported roughly $160 million.

So that’s where we are—or rather, were. So much has changed, so quickly, in this race. Trump’s conviction, for which he showed only contempt, and no remorse, only seemed to boost his status with MAGA die-hards. Meanwhile, ever since that unforgettable June 26 debate, top Democratic donors have been flipping out about Biden, who keeps insisting he’s in for the long haul.

And then came the attempt on Trump’s life, which has energized his already frenetic base, and could fuel his grassroots fundraising efforts.

On Sunday, less than 24 hours after a 20-year-old man fired an AR-15 at the Republican nominee, wounding him slightly, Trump’s campaign was already sending out pleas like the following, which landed in a colleague’s inbox at 2:51 pm ET that day:

I am Donald J. Trump, and I will NEVER SURRENDER!

I will always love you for supporting me.

Unity. Peace. Make America Great Again.