This story was produced in partnership with the National Catholic Reporter.

Millions of dollars in last-minute money is pouring into the battle over a pair of abortion-related ballot measures in Nebraska, and it is coming through an unusual and circuitous route.

Much of that cash is being spent by a new group called Common Sense Nebraska, which has shelled out a remarkable $4.9 million in the three weeks since it was formed—largely on ads opposing an initiative that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and supporting a separate initiative that would ban abortion.

As of the most recent campaign finance filings, the organization still had another $500,000 in the bank.

Nebraska is one of 10 states with abortion-related measures on the ballot. Last week, the National Catholic Reporter and Mother Jones reported that Catholic organizations around the country had contributed more than $1.9 million to the fight, with millions more flowing in from wealthy individuals with close ties to the church.

But what’s especially notable about the Common Sense Nebraska spending is the labyrinthine path that the money has taken. Most of the funds appear to have originated with the conservative, billionaire Ricketts family and with the conservative group CatholicVote, both of which have made the bulk of their donations since mid-October, according to state campaign finance records.

Common Sense Nebraska then routed the Ricketts and CatholicVote money to the campaigns of three local political candidates, including two incumbents running for reelection to the University of Nebraska’s board of regents. 

These local candidates, in turn, purchased massive amounts of television air time, which they then donated to the anti-abortion-rights PAC Protect Women & Children for ads about the ballot initiatives.

Elements of this arrangement were first reported last week by local news outlets, including the Lincoln Journal Star. Gavin Geis, the executive director of Common Cause Nebraska—a watchdog group unrelated to Common Sense Nebraska—told the Journal Star that shuffling money this way is not illegal but obscures the true source of donations and provides significant benefits for the political committees involved.

“By contributing airtime to ballot initiatives, candidates can shield donors from disclosing their support for the proposal and give them a financial advantage over their opponents due to federal rules that give candidates discounted airtime,” Geis said.

None of the candidates participating in this funding arrangement—University of Nebraska Regents Jim Scheer and Robert Schafer, and state legislative candidate Tanya Storer—responded to requests for comment for this story.

The sudden spending by Common Sense Nebraska has greatly increased the amount of money available to abortion rights opponents in the state. Through early October, Protect Women & Children, the PAC leading the anti-abortion ballot push, had raised and spent just over $4 million on the two initiatives. Almost all that money came from the Ricketts and another wealthy family, the Peeds; both families are well-known donors to Nebraska’s Catholic dioceses. But since Common Sense Nebraska was established on Oct. 14, it has raised an additional $5.4 million, almost all of which ended up going to Protect Women & Children in one form or another.

Of that $5.4 million, Common Sense Nebraska has donated $3.2 million to Scheer. Scheer, in turn, purchased $3.2 million worth of commercial airtime, which he then donated to Protect Women & Children for anti-abortion ads.

Another $687,000 of Common Sense Nebraska funds went to Schafer, who donated $667,000 worth of advertising time to Protect Women & Children. And Common Sense Nebraska contributed $283,000 to Storer’s campaign, which has made $231,000 worth of in-kind advertising donations to the Protect Women & Children.

Common Sense Nebraska has also donated $781,000 directly to Protect Women & Children, including donations as recently as Nov. 1. More donations may have occurred that have yet to be filed with the state campaign finance system. 

The majority of the money moving through Common Sense Nebraska’s coffers—$3.9 million—was donated by Marlene Ricketts, the wife of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts. Another $830,000 was donated by the group CatholicVote on Oct. 21 and 23.

The Ricketts family are prominent Catholics, and Joe Ricketts has given millions to the Catholic Church in Nebraska, including an estimated $34 million on the creation of a Catholic religious retreat center. The Ricketts family is also well known for their ownership of the Chicago Cubs baseball team and their involvement in Nebraska state politics. Joe Ricketts’ eldest son, Pete Ricketts, a Republican, previously served as the governor and is currently Nebraska’s junior senator.  

Under the leadership of its president, Brian Burch, CatholicVote has become a major player in conservative Catholic political circles. Like much of the MAGA-aligned right, the Wisconsin-based organization was initially reluctant to embrace Donald Trump. In 2016, it refused to endorse him, saying he was “problematic in too many ways.”

More recently, CatholicVote has touted Trump’s praise for the organization. In 2020, the group drew national media attention for using geofencing to capture Catholics’ cell phone data while they were attending Mass. The $10 million project then sent targeted political ads to Catholics in battleground states. In this cycle’s Republican primary, CatholicVote hosted a rally for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis but eventually endorsed Trump.

Initially a project of the Catholic branch of the Christian Coalition, CatholicVote later became part of the Fidelis Center for Law and Policy, founded by Burch in 2005. Fidelis’ most recent tax documents, from 2022, indicate revenue of $9.4 million—up from $4.8 million the previous year.

Elon Musk, far and away the richest man on the planet, is pouring tens of millions of dollars into efforts to get Donald Trump elected. In addition to his massively valuable promotion of Trump’s messaging on X—an in-kind donation if ever there was one—he reportedly gave $50 million to a group linked to immigrant-hater Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s morally abominable family separation policy. And then there’s the legally problematic $100 payments and $1 million lottery-style giveaways he’s been offering registered swing-state voters who sign a petition stating the following:

The First and Second Amendments guarantee freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. By signing below, I am pledging my support for the First and Second Amendments.

Weird, right? But Musk’s return on investment could be huge if Trump prevails and gives him even more power over the very government at whose teat Musk’s companies were nurtured to profitability—and on which they continue to depend. Also, let’s remember, tens of millions for this dude is the equivalent of pocket change for the rest of us. Here’s how much of Musk’s net worth $50 million represents:

0.000183486238532

But what of his philanthropy, you ask? Didn’t Musk sign Bill Gates’ “Giving Pledge,” vowing to give at least half of his wealth to charity?

Yes, he signed up in 2012, for what it’s worth. But he’s running way behind on his giving. Consider that, in all of 2022, according to his foundation’s latest tax filing, he gave $160.5 million to charitable causes. Musk made more than that just yesterday—a great deal more.

That’s right, Musk’s net worth increased by $2.7 billion on Friday, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires, a database that serves as a reminder of just how far our supposedly egalitarian American experiment has devolved into plutocracy—or oligarchy, if you prefer—a situation that founder John Adams had hoped we would avoid (though he wasn’t terribly confident that we would).

Put another way, the amount Musk gave to charity in one year is this much of what he gained in a day:

0.05962962962963

Six percent! Musk, by the way, is now roughly 100 times as rich as he was when he signed the pledge—a scenario Andrew Carnegie would consider grotesque. He’d best start acting more like MacKenzie Scott. Because, as a trusted advisor to industrialist John D. Rockefeller once warned his boss:

You must distribute it faster than it grows! If you do not, it will crush you, and your children, and your children’s children!

Now, Musk did contribute almost $2.3 billion in Tesla stock to his foundation in 2022, earning a fat tax break and locking in a huge, tax-free capital gain at the expense of America’s taxpayers. But our rules governing philanthropy are so toothless that he need only disburse a small fraction of these “charitable” assets. His foundation’s nest egg—roughly $7.2 billion at the end of 2022—generated $309 million in investment income that year, and the value of its unsold assets gained at least $373 million. Yet the amount it gave to charity was about the same as the previous year.

Federal law requires private foundations to spend down 5 percent of their assets annually (which includes overhead). Musk’s 2022 obligation was about $358 million—he didn’t give even half that. The government lets foundations average their disbursements over five years, but he’ll have to pick up his pace considerably.

Lest you were hoping the Musk Foundation’s tax documents would reveal sinister causes to which he may have donated, sorry to disappoint. His public giving is unobjectionable. What you have to watch out for, though, is the transfers to donor-advised funds. His foundation has, since 2018, moved more than $75 million over to a fund at Fidelity Charitable. For some unfathomable reason, the government lets such transfers count toward a foundation’s mandatory charitable payout.

Donor-advised funds are even more problematic than private foundations—although both cost taxpayers a fortune and are, as I explained in our must-read American Oligarchy issue, profoundly undemocratic. Not only are the creators not obligated to dole out a minimum of their assets each year, they are not obliged to reveal whom they are giving to. It’s dark money, in other words— convenient for anyone who wants to give secretly to odious nonprofits, including groups willing to subvert the democratic process if it will help put a certain candidate back in the White House.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A right-wing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the right-wing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, the Guardian has learned.

The Washington, DC-based nonprofit Environmental Law Institute (ELI)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation,” according to ELI’s website.

The American Energy Institute, a right-wing, pro-fossil fuel think tank, has been attacking ELI and its climate trainings in recent months. In August, the organization published a report saying ELI was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science.”

ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project is “falsely portraying itself as a neutral entity teaching judges about questionable climate science,” the report says. In reality, the American Energy Institute claims, the project is a partner to the more than two dozen US cities and states who are suing big oil for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the climate dangers of coal, oil, and gas usage.

In a PowerPoint presentation about the report found on its website, the group says the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) is “wholly aligned with the climate change plaintiffs and helps them corruptly influence judges behind closed doors.”

“Their true purpose is to preview the plaintiffs’ arguments in the climate cases in an ex parte setting,” the presentation says.

“The idea that [the Environmental Law Institute] is corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Both the report and the PowerPoint presentation link the American Energy Institute to CRC Advisors, a public relations firm chaired by right-wing dark money impresario Leo. Given his outsize role in shaping the US judiciary—Leo helped select multiple judicial nominees for former president Donald Trump, including personally lobbying for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment—his firm’s role in opposing climate litigation is notable.

“He was greatly responsible for moving our federal court systems to the right,” said David Armiak, the research director for Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group tracking money in politics, of Leo. CRC Advisors’ work with the American Energy Institute, Armiak said, seemed “to delegitimize a group that’s seeking to inform judges or the judicial system of climate science, something that [Leo] also opposed with some of his other efforts.”

The American Energy Institute report’s document properties show that its author was Maggie Howell, director of branding and design at CRC Advisors. And the PowerPoint’s document properties lists CRC Advisors’s vice president, Kevin Daley, as the author.

Neither CRC Advisors nor Leo responded to requests for comment.

In an email, the institute’s CEO, Jason Isaac, said: “American Energy Institute employed CRC Advisors to edit and promote our groundbreaking report on the corrupt relationship between our federal court system and leftwing dark money groups.”

But Kert Davies, the director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, who shared the report and PowerPoint with the Guardian, said ELI is “far from leftwing.”

The institute’s staff include a wide variety of legal and climate experts. Its board includes executives from Shell Group and BP—oil companies that have been named as defendants in climate litigation—and a partner at a law firm that represents Chevron. Two partners with the firm Baker Botts LLP, which represents Sunoco LP and its subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum Ltd, in a climate lawsuit filed by Honolulu, also sit on ELI’s leadership council, E&E News previously reported.

“ELI’s seminars are giving judges the ABCs of climate change, which is a complicated subject that they ought to know about,” said Davies. “The idea that they’re corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Asked for comment about ELI’s connection to oil companies, the American Energy Institute CEO, Isaac, said that “all of those companies have embraced and/or are pushing political agendas” that are “contrary to the best interest of Americans, American energy producers, and human flourishing,” including environmental, social, and governance investing and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Isaac described oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

“They are the appeasers, the ones feeding the crocodiles,” he said. He did not respond to questions about the extent of the relationship between the American Energy Institute and CRC Advisors.

In a statement, Nick Collins, a spokesperson for ELI, called the American Energy Institute report “full of misinformation and created by an organization whose leadership regularly spreads false claims about climate science,” and described the CJP curriculum as “fact-based and science-first, developed with a robust peer review process that meets the highest scholarly standards.”

The American Energy Institute’s attack on the judicial climate education program comes as the supreme court considers litigation that could put big oil on the hook for billions of dollars.

Honolulu is one of dozens of cities and states to sue oil majors for allegedly hiding the dangers of their products from the public. Hawaii’s supreme court ruled that the suit can go to trial, but the defendants petitioned the US Supreme Court to review that decision, arguing the cases should be thrown out because emissions are a federal issue that cannot be tried in state courts.

This past spring, far-right fossil fuel allies launched an unprecedented campaign pressuring the Supreme Court to side with the defendants and shield fossil fuel companies from the litigation. Several of the groups behind the campaign have ties to Leo.

In June, the Supreme Court asked the Biden administration to weigh in on the defendants’ request. Biden officials could respond as soon as this week. “It’s doubtful that AEI’s timing of their report release was a coincidence,” said Davies.

The Supreme Court may soon weigh in on another case, too: In April, 20 Republican state attorneys general filed “friend of the court” briefs asking the court to prevent states from being able to sue oil companies for climate damages. All of the signatories are members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, to which Leo’s Concord Fund is a major contributor.

In the weeks since its publication, the American Energy Institute report attacking ELI has received a surge of interest from right-wing media. Fox News featured the report, as did an array of conservative websites. On Thursday, The Hill published an op-ed by Ted Cruz attacking the ELI project. Other right-wing groups have previously questioned the motives of ELI.

CRC Advisors has counted Chevron, one of the plaintiffs in Honolulu’s lawsuit, as a client. In 2018, the Leo-led PR firm also worked on a campaign aimed at exonerating the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh from accusations of sexual assault.

Davies said it “would not be surprising” if CRC Advisors had a “large role” in the creation or promotion of the report attacking ELI’s judiciary trainings. “They’re known for running campaigns for corporate interests and rightwing interests,” he said.

In addition to his work with the American Energy Institute, Isaac also serves as a fellow at Texas Public Policy Foundation—a think tank backed by oil and gas companies that has recently garnered scrutiny for its role in drafting the ultraconservative policy playbook Project 2025.

A former Republican Texas state representative, Isaac has dedicated much of his career to disputing climate research and promoting misinformation to justify deregulation of the fossil fuel industry. Isaac recently responded to a Twitter post about Climate Week by the EPA, calling the conference on climate change “nothing more than a celebration of people suffering from mental illness, #EcoDysphoria, with those attending insisting the rest of us catch it.”

On a September 25 episode of the right-wing Wisconsin talk radio program “The Vicki McKenna Show,” Isaac offered a defense of the fossil fuel industry, describing oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

Formerly known as Texas Natural Gas Foundation, the American Energy Institute on its face appears to contribute little more than public relations work in defense of the fossil fuels industry. The group publishes blog posts defending carbon emissions and denouncing the push for climate action. It has also produced a handful of longer reports promoting laws that restrict environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing and opposing the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

Among its board members are Steve Milloy, who served on Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, once ran a tobacco industry front group, and is a well-known climate denier. Milloy did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the group’s most recent tax filings, the American Energy Institute, which lists four staffers and a CEO on its website, is not a lavish operation. The group brought in about $312,000 in revenue in 2022 and appears to fund its operations at least partly by selling merchandise—among other products, branded T-shirts, tote bags, and beer koozies emblazoned with the words, “I Embrace The High Carbon Lifestyle.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A right-wing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the right-wing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, the Guardian has learned.

The Washington, DC-based nonprofit Environmental Law Institute (ELI)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation,” according to ELI’s website.

The American Energy Institute, a right-wing, pro-fossil fuel think tank, has been attacking ELI and its climate trainings in recent months. In August, the organization published a report saying ELI was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science.”

ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project is “falsely portraying itself as a neutral entity teaching judges about questionable climate science,” the report says. In reality, the American Energy Institute claims, the project is a partner to the more than two dozen US cities and states who are suing big oil for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the climate dangers of coal, oil, and gas usage.

In a PowerPoint presentation about the report found on its website, the group says the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) is “wholly aligned with the climate change plaintiffs and helps them corruptly influence judges behind closed doors.”

“Their true purpose is to preview the plaintiffs’ arguments in the climate cases in an ex parte setting,” the presentation says.

“The idea that [the Environmental Law Institute] is corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Both the report and the PowerPoint presentation link the American Energy Institute to CRC Advisors, a public relations firm chaired by right-wing dark money impresario Leo. Given his outsize role in shaping the US judiciary—Leo helped select multiple judicial nominees for former president Donald Trump, including personally lobbying for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment—his firm’s role in opposing climate litigation is notable.

“He was greatly responsible for moving our federal court systems to the right,” said David Armiak, the research director for Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group tracking money in politics, of Leo. CRC Advisors’ work with the American Energy Institute, Armiak said, seemed “to delegitimize a group that’s seeking to inform judges or the judicial system of climate science, something that [Leo] also opposed with some of his other efforts.”

The American Energy Institute report’s document properties show that its author was Maggie Howell, director of branding and design at CRC Advisors. And the PowerPoint’s document properties lists CRC Advisors’s vice president, Kevin Daley, as the author.

Neither CRC Advisors nor Leo responded to requests for comment.

In an email, the institute’s CEO, Jason Isaac, said: “American Energy Institute employed CRC Advisors to edit and promote our groundbreaking report on the corrupt relationship between our federal court system and leftwing dark money groups.”

But Kert Davies, the director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, who shared the report and PowerPoint with the Guardian, said ELI is “far from leftwing.”

The institute’s staff include a wide variety of legal and climate experts. Its board includes executives from Shell Group and BP—oil companies that have been named as defendants in climate litigation—and a partner at a law firm that represents Chevron. Two partners with the firm Baker Botts LLP, which represents Sunoco LP and its subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum Ltd, in a climate lawsuit filed by Honolulu, also sit on ELI’s leadership council, E&E News previously reported.

“ELI’s seminars are giving judges the ABCs of climate change, which is a complicated subject that they ought to know about,” said Davies. “The idea that they’re corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Asked for comment about ELI’s connection to oil companies, the American Energy Institute CEO, Isaac, said that “all of those companies have embraced and/or are pushing political agendas” that are “contrary to the best interest of Americans, American energy producers, and human flourishing,” including environmental, social, and governance investing and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Isaac described oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

“They are the appeasers, the ones feeding the crocodiles,” he said. He did not respond to questions about the extent of the relationship between the American Energy Institute and CRC Advisors.

In a statement, Nick Collins, a spokesperson for ELI, called the American Energy Institute report “full of misinformation and created by an organization whose leadership regularly spreads false claims about climate science,” and described the CJP curriculum as “fact-based and science-first, developed with a robust peer review process that meets the highest scholarly standards.”

The American Energy Institute’s attack on the judicial climate education program comes as the supreme court considers litigation that could put big oil on the hook for billions of dollars.

Honolulu is one of dozens of cities and states to sue oil majors for allegedly hiding the dangers of their products from the public. Hawaii’s supreme court ruled that the suit can go to trial, but the defendants petitioned the US Supreme Court to review that decision, arguing the cases should be thrown out because emissions are a federal issue that cannot be tried in state courts.

This past spring, far-right fossil fuel allies launched an unprecedented campaign pressuring the Supreme Court to side with the defendants and shield fossil fuel companies from the litigation. Several of the groups behind the campaign have ties to Leo.

In June, the Supreme Court asked the Biden administration to weigh in on the defendants’ request. Biden officials could respond as soon as this week. “It’s doubtful that AEI’s timing of their report release was a coincidence,” said Davies.

The Supreme Court may soon weigh in on another case, too: In April, 20 Republican state attorneys general filed “friend of the court” briefs asking the court to prevent states from being able to sue oil companies for climate damages. All of the signatories are members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, to which Leo’s Concord Fund is a major contributor.

In the weeks since its publication, the American Energy Institute report attacking ELI has received a surge of interest from right-wing media. Fox News featured the report, as did an array of conservative websites. On Thursday, The Hill published an op-ed by Ted Cruz attacking the ELI project. Other right-wing groups have previously questioned the motives of ELI.

CRC Advisors has counted Chevron, one of the plaintiffs in Honolulu’s lawsuit, as a client. In 2018, the Leo-led PR firm also worked on a campaign aimed at exonerating the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh from accusations of sexual assault.

Davies said it “would not be surprising” if CRC Advisors had a “large role” in the creation or promotion of the report attacking ELI’s judiciary trainings. “They’re known for running campaigns for corporate interests and rightwing interests,” he said.

In addition to his work with the American Energy Institute, Isaac also serves as a fellow at Texas Public Policy Foundation—a think tank backed by oil and gas companies that has recently garnered scrutiny for its role in drafting the ultraconservative policy playbook Project 2025.

A former Republican Texas state representative, Isaac has dedicated much of his career to disputing climate research and promoting misinformation to justify deregulation of the fossil fuel industry. Isaac recently responded to a Twitter post about Climate Week by the EPA, calling the conference on climate change “nothing more than a celebration of people suffering from mental illness, #EcoDysphoria, with those attending insisting the rest of us catch it.”

On a September 25 episode of the right-wing Wisconsin talk radio program “The Vicki McKenna Show,” Isaac offered a defense of the fossil fuel industry, describing oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

Formerly known as Texas Natural Gas Foundation, the American Energy Institute on its face appears to contribute little more than public relations work in defense of the fossil fuels industry. The group publishes blog posts defending carbon emissions and denouncing the push for climate action. It has also produced a handful of longer reports promoting laws that restrict environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing and opposing the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

Among its board members are Steve Milloy, who served on Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, once ran a tobacco industry front group, and is a well-known climate denier. Milloy did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the group’s most recent tax filings, the American Energy Institute, which lists four staffers and a CEO on its website, is not a lavish operation. The group brought in about $312,000 in revenue in 2022 and appears to fund its operations at least partly by selling merchandise—among other products, branded T-shirts, tote bags, and beer koozies emblazoned with the words, “I Embrace The High Carbon Lifestyle.”

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

Former Florida state Sen. Frank Artiles was convicted by a Miami-Dade Circuit Court jury Monday evening, the latest fallout from the state’s 2020 “ghost candidates” scandal.

Artiles was convicted on three felony counts related to $44,000 in payments he made to Alex Rodriguez, a no-party candidate whose role was to siphon votes from Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, the Democratic incumbent. The six-member jury deliberated for seven hours before reaching its verdict. Artiles was acquitted on a fourth count of aiding and abetting a false voter registration. Artiles sat stone-faced as the guilty verdicts were read.

“They won. They were successful. They beat JJR,” public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen said in his opening argument. “They beat the incumbent named Rodriguez.” 

“They stole an election,” he said. 

Artiles’ defense attorney Frank Quintero had reminded jurors that ghost candidates are legal “so long as Florida election law is not violated.”

But that’s precisely what the jury found. 

Florida Power & Light’s then-CEO Eric Silagy had instructed underlings to make Florida state Sen. Jose Rodriguez’s life “a living hell.”

The term “ghost candidate” is used to describe a candidate who has no chance of winning, but runs to harm an actual contender’s chances. Ghost candidate Rodriguez was part of an opaquely funded 501(c)(4)—or “dark money”—effort enabled by consultants working for Florida Power & Light, a subsidiary of the NextEra utility conglomerate.

Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, who was never charged with wrongdoing, had ordered his underlings to “make [Sen. Rodriguez’s] life a living hell.” Silagy retired abruptly in January 2023 in the wake of reporting by Floodlight and its media partners about FPL’s involvement in the ghost candidate scandal.

Artiles was charged with conspiracy, making campaign contributions above the $1,000 limit, and “false swearing” for instructing Alex Rodriguez—who actually lived outside District 37—on how to fill out paperwork to get on the ballot. 

Artiles, who faced up to five years in prison per count, sat quietly throughout the two-week trial. He was flanked by his attorneys, Quintero and Frank Quiñon. Behind him in the Miami courtroom was a revolving cast of friends and family.

The charges stem from efforts to achieve a Republican supermajority in the Florida Senate by running three ghost candidates to take votes away from Democratic candidates in key 2020 races. The spoiler candidates were backed, in part, by a series of nonprofits controlled by Jeff Pitts, then-CEO of Matrix LLC, a consulting company that was working for Florida Power & Light, according to reporting by Floodlight and other news outlets

The nonprofits in question were 501(c)(4)s, which are not required to disclose their donors’ identities, and the prosecution stopped short of tracing the money back to its original source. On September 27, Florida federal judge Aileen Cannon dismissed a shareholder lawsuit accusing FPL’s parent company, NextEra Energy, of issuing misleading statements about its political activities.

From the utility’s perspective, as noted in our earlier, in-depth story on the scandal, expanding GOP dominance—by whatever means—would help fulfill the utility’s 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.

He was defeated by 32 votes by Ileana Garcia, founder of Latinas for Trump.

Prosecutors said consultants implicated in the scandal had withheld records that had been subpoenaed. Key evidence in the form of hundreds of text messages between Artiles and Rodriguez also went missing, they said.

Much of the trial revolved around the credibility of the state’s star witness, ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who admitted under cross examination that he had a difficult relationship with the truth. To buttress his credibility, prosecutors laid out the broader effort to influence the 2020 election. 

Their first witness was a reticent Pat Bainter, a north Florida peanut farmer and powerful operative for the state Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. 

In a pretrial deposition, Bainter, whose company, Data Targeting, did work for GOP candidates, had acknowledged he paid Artiles $15,000 a month for six months for on-the-ground research in the District 37 race, including running a spoiler candidate. Bainter also acknowledged he sent a $100,000 no-strings-attached payment to a 501(c)(4) nonprofit controlled by Artiles. 

Testimony and evidence presented at trial revealed that Bainter held meetings with Artiles and Garcia campaign consultants who had a business relationship with Pitts, then-CEO of Matrix.

“There is no other explanation for why the defendant is giving tens of thousands of dollars to Alex Rodriguez,” the prosecutor said.

Garcia’s campaign manager testified that Bainter held the purse strings for that campaign. Bainter, too, testified that his company worked for Garcia’s campaign.

Rodriguez took the stand late on the fourth day of the trial. Prosecutor VanderGiesen showed him totals from the 2020 race, in which he got 6,000 votes.

“Did you come about getting those votes honestly?”

“No,” Rodriguez responded. 

Rodriguez, who had pleaded guilty to election-related charges and served six months of home detention and three years of probation, also testified that Artiles offered him $50,000 to run as a spoiler: $25,000 before the election and $25,000 after.

But he was afraid Artiles would never come through on his promise to pay, so he “fabricated” a series of business deals involving construction equipment, diesel engines and COVID masks to extract money from Artiles. He also asked Artiles to help cover his rent and his daughter’s private school tuition, Rodriguez testified. 

At one point, he admitted, he invented a story about a Range Rover he was going to buy at auction for Artiles, asking the former state senator for a $10,900 payment.

His reason for all the scams? “I was concerned I wasn’t going to get the $50,000.”

The defense grilled Rodriguez, working to establish reasonable doubt about the nature of his transactions with Artiles. They portrayed the former senator as the victim in a series of fraudulent business deals and requests for financial help from Rodriguez. “The evidence is going to show that Rodriguez is a con artist, a professional con artist, a pathological liar,” Quintero told the jurors.

On the stand, Rodriguez didn’t defend himself, replying to Quintero’s increasingly forceful questions in a quiet monotone. 

The key question posed by the defense was: Could the state prove—incontrovertibly—that the payments at the heart of the case were illegal campaign contributions? 

“There is no other explanation,” VanderGiesen posited, “for why the defendant is giving tens of thousands of dollars to Alex Rodriguez.”

When approached by a reporter from Floodlight, Rodriguez declined to speak on the record until the end of the trial. He took the reporter’s phone number and said he would call. As he walked down the escalator, he shot the reporter a wink. 

The reporter also spoke to Artiles shortly before the verdict was handed down. Artiles called the trial “a colossal waste of time.”

“The press won’t report what’s really happening,” he said. 

The reporter replied that he’d be happy to write the whole story—if he could ever find out precisely what it was. 

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

Former Florida state Sen. Frank Artiles was convicted by a Miami-Dade Circuit Court jury Monday evening, the latest fallout from the state’s 2020 “ghost candidates” scandal.

Artiles was convicted on three felony counts related to $44,000 in payments he made to Alex Rodriguez, a no-party candidate whose role was to siphon votes from Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, the Democratic incumbent. The six-member jury deliberated for seven hours before reaching its verdict. Artiles was acquitted on a fourth count of aiding and abetting a false voter registration. Artiles sat stone-faced as the guilty verdicts were read.

“They won. They were successful. They beat JJR,” public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen said in his opening argument. “They beat the incumbent named Rodriguez.” 

“They stole an election,” he said. 

Artiles’ defense attorney Frank Quintero had reminded jurors that ghost candidates are legal “so long as Florida election law is not violated.”

But that’s precisely what the jury found. 

Florida Power & Light’s then-CEO Eric Silagy had instructed underlings to make Florida state Sen. Jose Rodriguez’s life “a living hell.”

The term “ghost candidate” is used to describe a candidate who has no chance of winning, but runs to harm an actual contender’s chances. Ghost candidate Rodriguez was part of an opaquely funded 501(c)(4)—or “dark money”—effort enabled by consultants working for Florida Power & Light, a subsidiary of the NextEra utility conglomerate.

Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, who was never charged with wrongdoing, had ordered his underlings to “make [Sen. Rodriguez’s] life a living hell.” Silagy retired abruptly in January 2023 in the wake of reporting by Floodlight and its media partners about FPL’s involvement in the ghost candidate scandal.

Artiles was charged with conspiracy, making campaign contributions above the $1,000 limit, and “false swearing” for instructing Alex Rodriguez—who actually lived outside District 37—on how to fill out paperwork to get on the ballot. 

Artiles, who faced up to five years in prison per count, sat quietly throughout the two-week trial. He was flanked by his attorneys, Quintero and Frank Quiñon. Behind him in the Miami courtroom was a revolving cast of friends and family.

The charges stem from efforts to achieve a Republican supermajority in the Florida Senate by running three ghost candidates to take votes away from Democratic candidates in key 2020 races. The spoiler candidates were backed, in part, by a series of nonprofits controlled by Jeff Pitts, then-CEO of Matrix LLC, a consulting company that was working for Florida Power & Light, according to reporting by Floodlight and other news outlets

The nonprofits in question were 501(c)(4)s, which are not required to disclose their donors’ identities, and the prosecution stopped short of tracing the money back to its original source. On September 27, Florida federal judge Aileen Cannon dismissed a shareholder lawsuit accusing FPL’s parent company, NextEra Energy, of issuing misleading statements about its political activities.

From the utility’s perspective, as noted in our earlier, in-depth story on the scandal, expanding GOP dominance—by whatever means—would help fulfill the utility’s 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.

He was defeated by 32 votes by Ileana Garcia, founder of Latinas for Trump.

Prosecutors said consultants implicated in the scandal had withheld records that had been subpoenaed. Key evidence in the form of hundreds of text messages between Artiles and Rodriguez also went missing, they said.

Much of the trial revolved around the credibility of the state’s star witness, ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who admitted under cross examination that he had a difficult relationship with the truth. To buttress his credibility, prosecutors laid out the broader effort to influence the 2020 election. 

Their first witness was a reticent Pat Bainter, a north Florida peanut farmer and powerful operative for the state Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. 

In a pretrial deposition, Bainter, whose company, Data Targeting, did work for GOP candidates, had acknowledged he paid Artiles $15,000 a month for six months for on-the-ground research in the District 37 race, including running a spoiler candidate. Bainter also acknowledged he sent a $100,000 no-strings-attached payment to a 501(c)(4) nonprofit controlled by Artiles. 

Testimony and evidence presented at trial revealed that Bainter held meetings with Artiles and Garcia campaign consultants who had a business relationship with Pitts, then-CEO of Matrix.

“There is no other explanation for why the defendant is giving tens of thousands of dollars to Alex Rodriguez,” the prosecutor said.

Garcia’s campaign manager testified that Bainter held the purse strings for that campaign. Bainter, too, testified that his company worked for Garcia’s campaign.

Rodriguez took the stand late on the fourth day of the trial. Prosecutor VanderGiesen showed him totals from the 2020 race, in which he got 6,000 votes.

“Did you come about getting those votes honestly?”

“No,” Rodriguez responded. 

Rodriguez, who had pleaded guilty to election-related charges and served six months of home detention and three years of probation, also testified that Artiles offered him $50,000 to run as a spoiler: $25,000 before the election and $25,000 after.

But he was afraid Artiles would never come through on his promise to pay, so he “fabricated” a series of business deals involving construction equipment, diesel engines and COVID masks to extract money from Artiles. He also asked Artiles to help cover his rent and his daughter’s private school tuition, Rodriguez testified. 

At one point, he admitted, he invented a story about a Range Rover he was going to buy at auction for Artiles, asking the former state senator for a $10,900 payment.

His reason for all the scams? “I was concerned I wasn’t going to get the $50,000.”

The defense grilled Rodriguez, working to establish reasonable doubt about the nature of his transactions with Artiles. They portrayed the former senator as the victim in a series of fraudulent business deals and requests for financial help from Rodriguez. “The evidence is going to show that Rodriguez is a con artist, a professional con artist, a pathological liar,” Quintero told the jurors.

On the stand, Rodriguez didn’t defend himself, replying to Quintero’s increasingly forceful questions in a quiet monotone. 

The key question posed by the defense was: Could the state prove—incontrovertibly—that the payments at the heart of the case were illegal campaign contributions? 

“There is no other explanation,” VanderGiesen posited, “for why the defendant is giving tens of thousands of dollars to Alex Rodriguez.”

When approached by a reporter from Floodlight, Rodriguez declined to speak on the record until the end of the trial. He took the reporter’s phone number and said he would call. As he walked down the escalator, he shot the reporter a wink. 

The reporter also spoke to Artiles shortly before the verdict was handed down. Artiles called the trial “a colossal waste of time.”

“The press won’t report what’s really happening,” he said. 

The reporter replied that he’d be happy to write the whole story—if he could ever find out precisely what it was. 

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.”