Friend,

I expect to ruffle a few feathers when I call out the dark money infecting our politics. I expect a few squawks when I shine a light on the interests behind the secret political spending. After all, powerful interests have a lot of money invested, and a big stake in protecting their covert influence operations.

Now, with three years to go until I’m up for re-election, a dark-money group has launched TV ads against me because I’m exposing what they’re up to. 

A squid squirts out black ink to create a distraction when it’s threatened. This TV ad is squid ink, squirted out from increasingly nervous dark-money groups. I go after dark money, and a dark-money-funded group puts out a dark-money-funded attack ad to accuse me of being involved in . . . dark money. Kind of funny, actually – in a weird, weird way.

Big special interests want to stop me from exposing what they’ve done to our government. They’re trying their best to distract from the truth. The truth is, these special interests are running a covert political operation against their own country, and they don’t want people to know about it. When I get a big, desperate reaction like this, I know I’m really on the right track.  I’m not going to stop.

Media campaigns full of lies and fueled by secret donations are part of the special interest playbook. It’s their nature to resort to these sorts of smears. But if they think this nonsense will shut me up, they’re sorely mistaken.

Every day, I’m fighting the special interests who use dark money to poison and pollute our politics. I won’t stay silent, and today I’m asking for your support: Will you make a contribution of $5 or more to my campaign today to help me keep fighting back and taking on the special interests and dark-money groups blocking climate action and putting profits over the American people?

Thank you so much for your support. We are in this together.

Sheldon Whitehouse