Mark Kelly has some explaining to do

The Arizona Republic just released a detailed report about how Democrat Mark Kelly went from serving our country to serving himself as he built a “celebrity brand” that got him rich.

There’s a lot to sift through between the 64 corporate-paid speeches he has publicly reported, the corporate board and advisory positions, and the role he finally admits to playing in order to secure investments from a communist Chinese firm.

“From the first day of his Senate campaign, Mark Kelly has lied to the people of Arizona by hypocritically denouncing corporate money in politics, despite years of using corporate money to line his pockets and build a ‘celebrity brand,'” said NRSC spokesperson Joanna Rodriguez. “Kelly even sold out in order to persuade Chinese communist executives to invest in his space company. Once again, Mark Kelly’s personal finances reveal he will do anything for a buck, and now he’s saying anything for a vote.”

Read an excerpt below and the full story here.

The Arizona Republic: ‘A celebrity brand’: How Senate candidate Mark Kelly made his millions

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The records illustrate a transformation from high-profile congressional spouse to multimillionaire Senate candidate based on a slew of investments, ties to business barons and a lucrative public persona that took him from coast-to-coast and outside the United States for paid appearances….

The opportunities included book deals, paid public speaking, corporate board memberships, investing and business consulting. Along with his wife, Kelly became one of the most visible advocates of gun-control policies in the country. They launched a gun-violence prevention group after the 2012 slayings of children and adults at a Connecticut elementary school.

Along the way, Kelly did business with Chinese interests, participated in a marketing strategy criticized as sexist, and sometimes had financial ties to businesses with records at odds with his own on environmental conservation…

Tencent is an investor in Tucson’s World View Enterprises, a company that provides near-space imaging using balloons. Its CEO said the executive won’t affect the Tucson operations because Tencent only has a financial stake, not a technological presence.

Kelly co-founded World View and still owns company stock worth at least $100,000. When the company was starting, Kelly acknowledged talking to a representative of Tencent about the vision for World View before they invested in the company.

“I’m the, the test pilot, I am the technical guy. I’m not the CEO or the finance guy, or I wasn’t,” he said.

When pressed to answer whether he was directly involved in pitching World View to Tencent, he said: “I had a very brief conversation with one individual that lasted about 30 seconds, maybe a minute.”

That conversation, he said, involved the vision for World View…

Keep reading here.