Jordan Boyd writes for the Federalist about an inconvenient development for a U.S. senator who complains about Supreme Court ethics.
Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse allegedly spent the last 17 years in the Senate pushing legislation that directly benefits the environmentalist groups that pay his wife.
A 21-page ethics complaint, filed by Judicial Watch last month, alleges Whitehouse abused his congressional position to enrich himself and his wife, Sandra Thorton Whitehouse, president of the consulting firm Ocean Wonks. She also raked in millions consulting for Ocean Conservancy and sat on the advisory board at AltaSea from 2015 to 2018, says the complaint.
Whitehouse is Democrats’ lead man in their effort to destroy the credibility of the Supreme Court with sham ethics grievances and dark money allegations. He only became interested in scrutinizing the court’s “ethics” code when it became politically and personally profitable to target the conservative-controlled court.
Not only has Whitehouse refused to probe Democrat-nominated justices’ decades-long ethics violations, he’s also spent the last 15 years skirting criticism for his conflicts of interest and dark money deals. The Senate Ethics Code prohibits members from using the “prestige or influence of a position in the Senate for personal gain.”
Over his nearly two decades in office, however, Whitehouse allegedly orchestrated and sponsored several pieces of legislation that “contains authorization for, and appropriation of, numerous federal environmental programs that fund activities undertaken by his wife’s clients, which constitute a ‘limited class’ of beneficiaries for such federal funds.”
Just two years after taking office, Whitehouse penned a letter for the U.S. Department of Transportation to approve a $22 million grant for a company that planned to lease offshore land in Providence, Rhode Island to Deepwater Wind. Three weeks later, Deepwater Wind hired Whitehouse’s wife as a consultant.Whitehouse repeatedly denied his wife consulted for Deepwater even after the company issued a press release boasting about her employment and local media outlets highlighted the suspect agreement.
