Before his political career, Kelly, a former astronaut and Navy combat veteran, gave paid speeches to varied audiences, his campaign said. “Soon after leaving the Navy and NASA, like many other former NASA astronauts, Mark had the opportunity to speak about his experiences to a variety of groups,” said campaign spokesperson Jacob Peters. “Mark has spoken about his experiences in space, the Navy, and overcoming tragedy, and he shares many of those same experiences often with Arizonans on the campaign trail.”

“A single prescription can cost thousands,” Kelly says in the ad released Tuesday. “But Washington politicians, they look the other way after taking millions from drug companies.”

In a new ad this week, Arizona Democratic Senate candidate Mark Kelly slammed Washington politicians for taking money from drug companies. While Kelly has mostly eschewed corporate cash as a politician, he has a history of taking corporate — and pharmaceutical industry — money before he launched his Senate bid last February.

The bulk of Kelly’s paid speaking engagements were made before he became a politician.

His paid speeches, Kelly’s campaign said, do not focus on political or policy matters. Though Kelly often speaks from memory, his campaign released a rough transcript, in the interest of transparency, to the Arizona Republic of what it said was a typical paid speech.

Kelly’s history with corporate cash runs deep. Before entering the race, he received $50,000 in compensation from a Chicago-based investment firm for serving on the boards of two medical transport companies, the Arizona Republic reported.

The bulk of Kelly’s paid speaking engagements were made before he became a politician. From 2012 to 2018, as a private citizen, Kelly gave a raft of paid speeches to pharmaceutical and healthcare industry companies, including Optum, UnitedHealth’s fastest growing subsidiary; AmerisourceBergen, which was under recent federal investigation for its involvement in the opioid crisis; Express Scripts, a company that manages prescriptions online; Innovatix, a group health care purchasing organization, and Paradigm, a hospital and healthcare company focusing on worker’s compensation.

The Intercept previously reported that, from 2011 to 2017, Kelly made some 19 paid corporate speeches. Those earlier speeches also included talks to Goldman Sachs and the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit.

Between January 2018 and June 2019 — a period that covers Kelly’s last year as a private citizen and four months of his Senate race — he pulled in at least $1.8 million from paid corporate speeches.

Since his Senate run began, Kelly has given at least 11 paid speeches to a variety of foundations, academic institutions, and business associations for a total of $256,275.

His campaign said the speeches were to fulfill commitments he had made before launching his Senate bid. One of the paid speeches delivered after the campaign kicked off was to the Wasatch Speaker Series, which was hosted by the Eminent Series Group and sponsored by Intermountain Healthcare.

Kelly promoted his ad launch this week on a local CBS affiliate. “Big pharmaceutical companies are able to protect these profits by being involved in the campaigns to help folks get elected,” he told the local anchor. “That’s one of the reasons I don’t take any corporate PAC money.”

The anti-corporate PAC pledge has been a theme of Kelly’s campaign. He began his Senate bid last year denouncing corporate PAC money — a pledge he reprised in the latest ad, with a focus on pharmaceutical money.

“Drug companies protect their profits, and those politicians, they protect their careers,” Kelly says in the new ad. “But isn’t Congress’s job to protect us?”