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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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