The biggest dark money conspiracy theorist in the US Senate, Sheldon Whitehouse, is now being accused of using his position in the Senate to help enrich himself by voting for laws that provided taxpayer grant money to his wife’s organization.
An ethics watchdog group is asking the Senate to investigate Whitehouse over the conflict of interest.
Here’s more via Fox News:
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., is being accused of violating ethics rules after backing laws that financially benefited his wife’s environmental organization.
The Democratic senator and climate hawk voted for key laws that provided funding for grants to the environmental non-profit group that works with his wife, Sandra Whitehouse, and pays her through a consulting firm.
The ethics watchdog, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), is asking the Senate Select Committee on Ethics Chairman James Lankford, R-Okla., and Vice Chairman Chris Coons, D-Del., to investigate Whitehouse “to determine whether he violated the Senate ethics rules on conflicts of interest.” The group works primarily to draw attention to potential Democratic lawmaker ethics violations.
Whitehouse’s wife, Sandra, is employed as president of consulting firm Ocean Wonks LLC and has been since 2017, per her LinkedIn page. Before that, she was a direct employee of Ocean Conservancy, serving as Senior Policy Adviser beginning in 2008.
Ocean Conservancy has received more than $14.2 million in federal grants since 2008, per USASpending.gov. During 2024 alone, it was given two sizable grants, one for $5.2 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for marine debris cleanup in September and another for $1.7 million from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), again to assist with marine debris cleanup.
The former was funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) championed by the Biden administration and voted for by Sen. Whitehouse. The latter was funded through the EPA’s annual appropriations bill, which Whitehouse also voted for.