Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., has built a reputation as an ethics crusader. Just last year, he filed a complaint against Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, and he’s stood on the Senate floor to warn of “dark money,” a term for money donated by nonprofits with undisclosed lists of donors.
Now, Whitehouse is facing his own ethics scandal.
According to a complaint filed late last month by watchdog organization Judicial Watch, Whitehouse himself may have violated the Senate’s ethics rules over a conflict of interest.
Whitehouse co-founded the Senate Oceans Caucus, and he still serves as co-chair. In this new complaint, Whitehouse is accused of introducing legislation likely to benefit his wife’s area of expertise, marine landscaping.
The senator’s wife, Sandra Thornton Whitehouse, serves as president of Ocean Wonks LLC, a for-profit firm specializing in environmental consulting.
According to the complaint, Thornton Whitehouse has consulted for at least two nonprofit organizations and didn’t disclose it on his donor lists. For example, she reportedly consulted for Ocean Conservancy.
Meanwhile, Whitehouse introduced the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act in 2020. The bill became law in 2020, and it created Marine Debris Response Trust Fund for ocean cleanup, the same service provided by Ocean Conservancy and funded by taxpayers.
That’s just one example. The complaint enumerates ten potential conflicts of interest.
“Based on facts uncovered from public sources, Judicial Watch hereby requests that the Senate Select Committee on Ethics launch a preliminary inquiry into the activities of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and his wife, Sandra Thornton Whitehouse, which raise serious questions about conflicts of interest,” Judicial Watch said in the 21-page complaint.
“Such publicly available information likely represents only the tip of an iceberg, the depth of which the Committee’s subpoena power can and should uncover.”
Whitehouse filed his complaint against Alito last year. The senator took issue with Alito’s failure to disclose certain gifts, coupled with the judge’s public remarks on the constitutionality of the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act.
The year prior, Whitehouse released a book called The Scheme, an account of dark money’s influence on the Supreme Court.
At the time, Whitehouse stood accused of spreading conspiracy theories. “Mr. Whitehouse devotes little effort to weighing the legal reasoning behind these decisions. He is more interested in who benefits: overwhelmingly, in his view, business interests,” one critic said of Whitehouse’s book The Scheme.
Now, if the complaint’s most severe concerns turn out to be true, then Whitehouse himself may have benefitted from dark money.
The Horn editorial team