This is ironic, considering Whitehouse is fond of accusing others of taking dark money.
The New York Post reports:
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse backed laws to benefit wife’s company and their ‘financial interests’: ethics complaintDemocratic 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reports from local Rhode Island outlets.The senator denied the hire ever happened, but the news articles have never been retracted.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.
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