Unreal, do you think the DeSantis controlled PSC will do anything about this? ‘Make his life a living hell.’ The FPL-financed plot to torpedo a Miami lawmaker (msn.com) When Eric Silagy, head of Florida Power & Light, heard that a nettlesome state senator had filed yet another bill threatening his utility’s hold on Florida’s solar-energy market, he gave his top executives a clear signal to target the politician, José Javier Rodríguez, a Miami-area Democrat. “JJR at it again,’’ Silagy wrote in a Jan. 7, 2019, email to senior FPL executives after reading a news story about the bill. “I want you to make his life a living hell....seriously.” Their marching orders delivered, the executives immediately forwarded the message to Jeff Pitts, CEO of Alabama-based Matrix LLC and FPL’s chief political operative. Over the next 18 months, Pitts would get to work using a maze of nonprofits to secretly finance an operation aimed at defeating Rodríguez, a twice-elected incumbent, and replacing him with a Republican less hostile to FPL’s interests. It worked. The 2020 takedown of Rodríguez was as simple as it was effective. After receiving and rejecting an initial plan to finance a primary challenge, FPL and its political consulting team went with Plan B: creating a secretive nonprofit that could be used to funnel money to a no-party candidate in the general election — one who shared the same last name as the incumbent. That candidate, a Boca Raton auto parts dealer named Alex Rodriguez, siphoned away 6,300 votes. José Javier Rodríguez lost by just 32 votes.
