By Matthew Langston and Tyler Musialowski
UNC FactCheck previously wrote a story in early June about accusations made against Dan McCready, the Democratic candidate in the 9th District congressional election, that claimed he invested in a solar farm construction company that outsourced production to China.
Those accusations, first made in this Fox News story, were discussed in detail in our original story. Also discussed were several questionable claims made by Sen. Dan Bishop, McCready’s Republican opponent, and the National Republican Congressional Committee that stemmed from the Fox News story.
Since we published our original story, the N.C. Business Daily website posted a story of its own on the subject of McCready and China. That story included quotes that McCready had provided to us for our story.
The entire Business Daily story was then reposted in a NRCC press release.
The story itself has a few misleading claims on the subject that also should be addressed.
So, let’s examine the issues.
The Business Daily story begins by saying that the N.C. Republican Party wants answers from McCready regarding investments in a company that he made through his firm, Double Time Capital, and “for jobs allegedly lost to China and U.S. exposure to national security threats.”
The company referenced is Strata Solar, a solar farm construction company that Double Time has done business with, and involves claims that we already reported on in detail and deemed misleading or questionable.
The Business Daily calls Strata “a company [McCready] now denies investing in.”
When previously asked for comment on the subject, McCready provided UNC FactCheck with an exclusive statement in which he said, “To be clear, we never invested in Strata Solar, we never outsourced a single job, and there is no Huawei equipment in our solar farms.”
Huawei, a Chinese electronics firm, came under scrutiny by the U.S. government for potential security threats, but President Trump has since eased restrictions as part of negotiations to thaw relations with China. So, it is questionable whether investment in Huawei still represents any of the threats cited by Bishop and the Republicans.
McCready’s firm invested in select solar construction projects carried out by Strata, but reportedly did not invest in Strata itself.
We also stated in our previous story that it was misleading to claim, as the NRCC and the N.C. Republican Party have done, that Strata Solar outsourced jobs to China.
We reached that conclusion for two reasons.
For one, the Fox News story that the NRCC has frequently cited as the source for its claims never explicitly mentioned anything about the outsourcing of jobs. Instead, it talked about Strata outsourcing production by purchasing parts for its solar farms from Chinese companies.
McCready also said that his firm “never outsourced a single job” and reiterated his support for a stronger American stance towards China on solar manufacturing.
Another claim made by the Business Daily story was that McCready “took down an interview” with the Charlotte Business Journal “in which he said ‘much’ of his $80 million solar investments were with Strata Solar and posed for photos in front of Strata-made solar panels.”
The Business Daily story links to a web-cached version of the referenced article and claims the web-cached version is the only way to access the article because it has been taken down.
The claim that this article was taken down by McCready seems to be false because Google search results still show that referenced article. A link to that article, which was referenced in our previous story, also still works. A paid subscription is needed to read the article, though.
No edits seem to have been made to the Charlotte Business Journal article either, as there were no noticeable differences between the web-cached version and the version currently available on the Charlotte Business Journal website.
