Re: Independent expenditures by Protect Progress in the MA‑04 Democratic primary

This week, voters across our district began receiving glossy mail on your behalf paid for by Protect Progress, a cryptocurrency-industry super PAC headquartered outside Massachusetts. I am writing to ask you to publicly renounce that spending, to tell Protect Progress to stay out of the Fourth District, and to join me in signing a People’s Pledge to keep outside money out of this race altogether.

Protect Progress is the Democratic-facing arm of the Fairshake network, the largest corporate super PAC operation in American politics, bankrolled by Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and Andreessen Horowitz.¹ It exists for one purpose: to elect candidates who will vote the crypto industry’s way on regulation. Just this month, the Miami Herald reported that Protect Progress has been running mailers and television ads in Florida’s 24th District that dress up attacks on Miami-Dade Commissioner Oliver Gilbert with fabricated Miami Herald headlines—headlines the paper never wrote, attached to stories that in at least one case never even mentioned the candidate.² The Herald publicly disputed the ads; the PAC’s spokesman refused to withdraw them.^3,4

Since 2020 you have accepted more than $77,500 from crypto-industry sources, including $29,800 tied to Andreessen Horowitz, $13,200 from the Winklevoss twins, and a maximum contribution from Sam Bankman-Fried that you declined to return even after his conviction for fraud.⁵ In March 2022 you joined the “Blockchain Eight” letter pressuring the SEC to stand down from gathering information from crypto firms; in March 2025 you voted to repeal IRS reporting requirements for DeFi platforms; and on July 17, 2025 you voted for H.R. 3633, the CLARITY Act, which strips the SEC of jurisdiction over much of the industry.⁵ Less than four months after that vote, the CEO and COO of Solana Labs—a company that benefits directly from that jurisdictional carve-out—wrote your campaign $10,500 in maximum checks, deposited the same day.⁶

On August 13, 2026, Protect Progress reported an independent expenditure of $47,381.90 for direct mail production, printing, and postage supporting your re-election, paid to Kinetic Campaigns of Annandale, Virginia.⁷ When this letter was first published on August 16, that was the committee’s only reported independent expenditure in this race, and I wrote that its pattern elsewhere suggested it was a down payment. Three days later the committee proved the point. On August 19 it filed a second 24-hour notice reporting another $47,381.90 to the same vendor for a second mailer, with an expenditure date of August 18, bringing its reported spending in this primary to $94,763.80.⁸ On August 22 it filed a third notice, this one reporting a further $47,381.90 to the same vendor for a third mailer, with a disbursement date of August 13 and public distribution on August 21, the day before early voting opened, bringing the committee’s reported spending in this race to $142,145.70.⁹ And on August 27 it filed a fourth notice, reporting yet another $47,381.90 to the same vendor for a fourth mailer, publicly disseminated on August 26, in the middle of the early-voting week, and bringing its reported spending in this primary to $189,527.60—nearly $190,000 in two weeks.¹⁰ In Florida’s 24th, the same committee’s mail was followed within days by nearly two million dollars in television buys.¹¹

The four Protect Progress mailers received in MA‑04, August 2026, reported to the FEC in 24-hour notices between August 13 and August 27. Each carries the disclaimer “Paid for by Protect Progress. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.”

The first mailer’s slogan, rendered in script beneath your name, is “Always Working For Us.” For months, the door hangers my volunteers have carried to tens of thousands of doors in this district have carried our campaign’s slogan: “For an economy that works for all of us.” A national super PAC that has never before spent a dollar in Massachusetts arrived in our primary echoing the signature language of your opponent’s field program. The resemblance is close enough to invite a harder question: whether anyone connected to your campaign shared messaging, strategy, or material information with Protect Progress or its agents. As you know, coordination between a campaign and a super PAC converts an “independent” expenditure into an illegal in-kind contribution under 52 U.S.C. § 30116 and 11 C.F.R. § 109.21.

On August 19, the Boston Globe answered part of that question, and the answer is that no private channel was needed. In a report on the spread of “red-boxing” in this year’s Massachusetts primaries, the practice of campaigns posting public messaging instructions for the super PACs they are forbidden to coordinate with privately, the Globe found that your campaign had tucked such a section at the bottom of its “Jake In The Media” web page, directing an outside group to target likely Democratic primary voters who participated in at least one of the last three primaries.¹² That section is still live on your website as of this writing. It instructs that those voters “need to see in their mailboxes and across digital platforms” that you are “a young parent” and that you understand “the struggles working families face” and have “been focused on lowering costs and delivering results.”¹³ The Globe observed that the first Protect Progress mailer delivered that message nearly word for word, presenting you as “a father with a young family” who “understands the struggles that so many face.”¹² It also noted what this spending compounds: your campaign held $7.4 million at the end of June, while mine reported about $20,000.¹²

Set the second mailer beside your red box and the correspondence is unmistakable. Your page asks that voters hear you have been “standing up to Donald Trump” and “corruption in Washington”; the mailer’s lead panel, “Taking The Fight To MAGA Extremists,” credits you as “a leader in the effort to confront the illegal actions of this Administration and the corruption in Washington.” Your page asks that voters hear that “as a Marine veteran, he knows first hand we need to get weapons of war off our streets”; the mailer presents you as “a Marine veteran who has deployed with assault weapons” who knows “they belong nowhere near our neighborhoods.” Your page asks for a message about lowering costs and cutting out “drug-pricing middlemen”; the mailer promises you are “working everyday to lower costs, especially prescription drug costs, for working families.” I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying. Red-boxing is not illegal. It works because the instructions sit on a public web page where any super PAC can read them without a call or an email ever taking place, which is why campaign finance watchdogs say it undermines the spirit of the coordination rules.¹² But legal is not the same as defensible, and a message a super PAC executes from your campaign’s own instruction sheet is not independent in any sense a voter would recognize. That is exactly the arrangement a People’s Pledge exists to shut down.

I am asking you to do what Massachusetts Democrats have done before when outside money threatened to drown out our voters. In 2012, Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren signed the People’s Pledge: if any outside group spent on a candidate’s behalf, that candidate’s campaign donated half the cost of the ad to a charity of the opponent’s choosing. It worked. Outside spending in that race collapsed, and the debate belonged to the candidates and the voters. I am prepared to sign an identical pledge with you this week, before early voting begins on August 22, and I will be bound by it just as you would be: if any group runs independent expenditures on my behalf, my campaign will pay the penalty the same as yours.

So the asks are simple. Publicly renounce Protect Progress’s expenditures and any future spending it undertakes in this district. Call on the committee, by name, to cease all activity in the MA‑04 primary. Confirm that neither your campaign nor its agents have coordinated with Protect Progress or the Fairshake network, and sign the People’s Pledge with me. If you believe your record on the crypto industry can be defended to the voters of this district, defend it at a debate—which you have been refusing to do for months.