Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse backed laws to benefit wife’s company and their ‘financial interests’: ethics complaint
Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a crusader for new ethics guidelines at the Supreme Court, was himself hit with an ethics complaint last month after backing two dozen pieces of legislation that have benefited his wife’s environmental consulting company.
The conservative government accountability group Judicial Watch asked the Senate Ethics Committee to “immediately investigate” Whitehouse (D-RI), alleging there was “strong evidence” he “violated ethics conflicts of interest rules,” according to a copy of the Feb. 21 complaint exclusively obtained by The Post.
“Senator Whitehouse seems to have stepped over the line of standard environmental legislative advocacy and used his Senate office to advance his and his wife’s personal and financial interests,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said.
The complaint further urged Ethics panel chairman Chris Coons (D-Del.) and ranking member James Lankford (R-Okla.) to subpoena relevant parties should an investigation be launched.
Whitehouse, 68, has been dogged by ethics questions since his first years in the Senate, when he secured a $22 million federal grant for an offshore wind company, Deepwater Wind, that had hired his wife as a “permitting consultant,” the complaint states, citing contemporaneous reports from local Rhode Island outlets.
The senator denied the hire ever happened, but the news articles have never been retracted. Whitehouse has also dismissed conflict of interest concerns in the past, noting that he cannot determine which companies receive federal funds.
Meanwhile, Whitehouse has been at the forefront of efforts by Democrats to delegitimize the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, leading calls for ethics reform and denouncing the influence of conservative “dark money” on the confirmation of now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020.
In a Senate floor speech after Barrett’s confirmation, Whitehouse said the “unlimited anonymous spending to influence our judiciary undermines the integrity of our judicial system and damages Americans’ confidence that all people receive equal justice under law.”
Sandra Thornton Whitehouse is currently the president of Newport, RI-based, for-profit consulting firm Ocean Wonks, LLC, raking in millions of dollars for her work with non-profit clients that profited from her husband’s legislative activity.
Since 2009, DC-based Ocean Conservancy has employed Sandra Whitehouse and paid her more than $2.6 million to help its work combating climate change and pollution, as well as ocean planning, tax filings show.
She also received $490,000 for advising AltaSea on renewable energy and ocean mapping initiatives between 2015 and 2018, according to that organization’s tax filings.
During that period, Sheldon Whitehouse supported at least 24 bills with provisions that directly benefited her clients, the Daily Caller previously reported.
Those included the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which set aside $1.4 billion for Ocean Conservancy’s marine spatial program, and President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which gave a 30% tax credit to a wind farm construction project off Block Island that Deepwater started in 2016.
The Save Our Seas Act of 2020 also handed out its largest grants for marine debris clean-up to Ocean Conservancy, with nearly $1 million allocated over the next two years.
As a founding member of the Senate Oceans Caucus, Whitehouse also passed a law as part of the 2015 budget bill to create a subagency in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with which Ocean Conservancy has a partnership, that has doled out $466 million total in grants.
Other laws have yet to be enacted but would benefit Sandra Whitehouse’s work as a policy adviser at Running Tide Technology, which works to remove carbon dioxide from the ocean, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
“Given Senator Whitehouse’s longstanding practice of sponsoring or co-sponsoring that directly benefits his wife and/or her clients, we urge the Senate Ethics Committee to conduct a preliminary investigation to disinter the full extent of Mrs. Whitehouse’s consulting activities, with both for-profit and nonprofit entities that may create a reasonable appearance of a conflict of interest with Senator Whitehouse’s official duties,” the complaint concludes.
“This is the latest in a long string of erroneous conspiracy theories peddled by the dark-money Judicial Watch, going back to the group’s claims that Vince Foster was murdered,” a spokeswoman for Whitehouse told The Post.
“The billionaires behind this group would like to try to stem Senator Whitehouse’s efforts to shine a light on what they’ve done to block progress on the issues Americans overwhelmingly support. But far-right special interests will not slow down the Senator’s push for accountability on behalf of the American people.”
