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 As of this writing it is the committee’s only reported independent expenditure in this race, but its pattern elsewhere suggests it is a down payment: in Florida’s 24th, the same committee’s mail was followed within days by nearly two million dollars in television buys.⁸

Protect Progress mailer received in MA‑04, August 2026 (both sides). Disclaimer reads “Paid for by Protect Progress. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.”

Its 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.

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 expenditure 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.