by Josh Christenson title via Carrie Severino
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The senator denied the hire ever happened, but the news articles have never been retracted.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.
In his defense, no one expects Democrats to be anything other than corrupt. And, in addition to being corrupt, Whitehouse is a moron.