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Sheldon Whitehouse

Official portrait of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island. (link)

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Sheldon Whitehouse (born 19551) is a Democratic politician and the junior U.S. Senator for Rhode Island, serving since 2007. 2 He was previously Attorney General of Rhode Island from 1999 to 2003 and before that, U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island during the Clinton administration. According to an academic study, Whitehouse was the 31st-most-partisan Senator to hold office between 1993 and 2016. 3

Whitehouse has supported applying the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against opponents of environmental regulation. 4 After Whitehouse gave a speech denouncing 24 right-of-center think tanks, the targeted think tanks sent a letter to Democratic Senators, including Whitehouse, accusing them of “tyranny” and “political retribution.” 5

During September 2020, Whitehouse appeared at a subcommittee of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and in prepared remarks accused center-right activists of running a network with “the earmarks of a massive covert operation” working “against their own country.” Later that day he was criticized by the Wall Street Journal editorial board for making a baseless accusation of “treasonous” behavior against his ideological opponents. After making the allegations to the committee, Whitehouse refused to accept questions and left the hearing room. 6

Left-of-center activists have criticized Whitehouse for his investment activities, with a Public Citizen lobbyist suggesting he has “one of the Senate’s more prolific players in the stock market.” 7 A 2017 report identified his family as holding as much as $1.3 million in shares of health and biomedical companies, making him the largest owner of such assets of any Senator sitting on committees that directly oversee those industries. 8

Background

Sheldon Whitehouse is a member of the Democratic Party and the junior U.S. Senator for Rhode Island. He was first elected to the Senate in 2006, starting his third term in January 2019. He was previously Attorney General of Rhode Island from 1999 to 2003 and U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island under President Bill Clinton. His Senate committee assignments as of the 116th Congress include the Committee on the Judiciary, the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, the Committee on the Budget, and the Committee on Environment and Public Works. 9

Whitehouse has regularly ranked as one of the most-partisan members of the Senate. The Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University evaluate members of Congress based on their willingness to sponsor or co-sponsor bi-partisan legislation. Of the people who held seats in the U.S. Senate from 1993 to 2016, Whitehouse ranked 210th in a field of 240, making him the 31st-most-partisan Senator over that period. The person he replaced, former Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R, later D-RI), ranked the most bi-partisan during the era. For 2017, Whitehouse ranked 86th out of 98 senators. For the 114th Congress (2015-2016) he ranked 90th out of 98. 10

Enemies Lists

Climate Policy Enemies List

Whitehouse has delivered more than 200 speeches on the Senate floor dedicated to climate change and other environmentalist topics. 11 He has accused some in the energy industry of acting like “thugs” who “own the joint” (meaning the U.S. Congress), and has declared government officials who oppose him to be “stooges” of the energy industry. 12

In a May 2015 opinion piece in the Washington Post, Whitehouse advocated a federal lawsuit against the energy industry using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. 13 Originally designed for and used in criminal cases to prosecute the mafia, RICO has a civil-lawsuit component that has since been applied to corporate targets such as cigarette manufacturers. Whitehouse admitted he did not “have enough information” to know whether “racketeering activity” had actually occurred with the energy industry, but speculated the civil discovery in a RICO lawsuit might uncover the evidence. 14 In March 2016, then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced she had referred Whitehouse’s RICO concern to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 15

In July 2016, two months after the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands sent a subpoena demanding private internal research records, communications, and donor information to libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Whitehouse led a group of 19 U.S. Senate Democrats in a two-day series of floor speeches denouncing CEI and many other free-market think tanks, with Whitehouse saying the research organizations were part of a “filthy thing in our democracy.” The Senate campaign was aimed at passage of a Congressional resolution that would have called on the non-profit groups to cooperate with “active or future investigations” of their climate-policy positions that might be launched against them by federal or state law enforcement officials. 16

The CEI president responded, saying Whitehouse had become the “new Sen. Joe McCarthy,” and that it “is unhealthy for democracy and abusive when members of Congress create an enemies list based on policy positions.” 17 A joint letter sent to all of the Democratic Senators from 22 targeted think tanks stated: “Your threat is clear: There is a heavy and inconvenient cost to disagreeing with you. Calls for debate will be met with political retribution. That’s called tyranny. And, we reject it.” 18

Whitehouse demanded a more-serious pursuit of a RICO case in 2018 and complained that Democrats still “haven’t done the basic due diligence prosecutors do putting an org chart together against a criminal enterprise.” 19

Implying Treasonous Behavior by Center-Right Judicial Groups

Whitehouse was the lead witness during a September 22, 2020, subcommittee hearing of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee titled: “Maintaining Judicial Independence and the Rule of Law: Examining the Causes and Consequences of Court Capture.” The committee, controlled by a Democratic-majority, had invited Whitehouse to share his allegation that right-of-center advocacy organizations were exerting an unfair advantage over the selection of appointees to the federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court. 20 In a July 2020 news release, jointly signed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D—CA), Whitehouse had accused these ideological opponents of a “decades long effort” to “rig the courts.”  21

Whitehouse read to the committee a brief 1100-word opening statement in which he mentioned Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy three times, at one point accusing Leo of playing a lead role in a large network that “has the earmarks of a massive covert operation, screened behind dark-money secrecy, run by a small handful of big special interests, against their own country.” Whitehouse also identified the United States Chamber of Commerce and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell as among the progenitors of this alleged network, which he accused of seeking to roll back “civil rights and women’s rights” and perpetuating “evil that makes other evils possible.”22 23 

After reading his prepared remarks and being thanked by Rep. Hank Johnson (D—GA), the committee chair, Whitehouse stood up, walked out of the hearing room, and refused to take questions. This occurred over the objections of Rep. Jim Jordan (R—OH), who—while Whitehouse was still in the room—asked: “He came in here and leveled all sorts of accusations against Republicans and he is not going to take any questions from us?” Chairman Johnson replied: “Our agreement with the senator is that he would not take questions.” 24 

In an editorial posted hours later the Wall Street Journal editorial board quoted Whitehouse’s statement and criticized him for making a baseless accusation of treason against mere ideological opponents: “Mr. Whitehouse sees his opponents as treasonous, though all of what he denounces is legal and protected by the First Amendment.” 25

The Journal’s editorial board also criticized Whitehouse for “refusing to abide by the normal practice for congressional witnesses of answering questions.” The Journal editors titled their essay “Sheldon Whitehouse Goes Dark: The Senator refuses to take questions about his own dark-money ties,” and stated a theory for why questions were not permitted: 26

Mr. Whitehouse knew that, if he answered questions, he was under legal obligation to tell the truth. House Republicans might have asked him about the dark-money outfit Arabella Advisors. This for-profit entity oversees nonprofits including the Sixteen Thirty Fund and the New Venture Fund, which together reported nearly a billion dollars in revenue in 2017 and 2018.

Arabella affiliate Demand Justice ran a smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh and is now calling for Democrats to pack the Supreme Court. Demand Justice bills itself as a “project” of the Sixteen Thirty Fund and the New Venture Fund, and in public disclosures it lists the same office address as the two nonprofits. 27

One day earlier the Wall Street Journal editorial board posted an editorial anticipating Whitehouse’s testimony and suggested the hearing was “a chance for the Republican minority to ask Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse about his ties to what he likes to call “dark money” and court packing.”28

Examples of the Journal editorial board’s suggested “Questions for Senator Whitehouse” included: 29

When a Daily Caller reporter asked Mr. Whitehouse last year if Demand Justice and groups like it have donated to his campaign, the Senator replied, “hope so.” So has he received money from Demand Justice and other Arabella affiliates? Has he collaborated with them to block President Trump’s judicial nominees? 30

[ . . . ] Curious minds may also wonder if any group that directly or indirectly receives funding from Arabella has paid for the briefs Mr. Whitehouse has filed at the Supreme Court. One of those briefs threatened the Court with being “restructured” if it didn’t rule the way he and four Senate colleagues demanded. 31

Prior to the September 22 testimony, Rep. Johnson gave Whitehouse a routine warning that written and oral statements provided to the committee by a witness were subject to “penalties of perjury.” Johnson then specifically cited the applicable federal statute.32

Whitehouse has been a frequent critic of the Pacific Legal Foundation.

“Creepy Front Groups” Allegation

In a May 2016 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Whitehouse accused the Pacific Legal Foundation of being one of six “creepy front groups” that had received funding from ExxonMobil in 2014 to promote “anti-scientific climate positions.” As proof for this allegation, Whitehouse quoted from a PLF legal petition in a 2013 case challenging the legal authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. In the single sentence quote selected by Whitehouse, the PLF lawyer stated that carbon dioxide was “a ubiquitous natural substance essential to life on Earth.” 33 34

A poster placed behind Whitehouse by a senate aide as he was speaking asserted that ExxonMobil had given $10,000 to PLF. The poster did not allege a quid pro quo between the $10,000 contribution and PLF’s decision to argue that carbon dioxide was a natural substance that makes life possible. The Pacific Legal Foundation’s tax filing for 2014 showed total grants and contributions of $12,965,856 and net assets of $44,565,295. 35 36

In a response, Pacific Legal Foundation attorney James Burling noted that the facts about carbon dioxide in the quote selected by Whitehouse were “completely true and not a single scientist on the planet would deny it.” Burling also criticized Whitehouse for ignoring the very next sentence in the petition, which read as follows: “Certain prominent scientific organizations have concluded that atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide from manmade sources contribute to global climate change.” Burling argued this context was critical because “nowhere in the petition do we raise any doubt about the science of global warming” [emphasis in original] or “even mention that others have cast any doubt on the science.” 37

Palazzolo Case

Prior to becoming a U.S. Senator, Whitehouse was the attorney general of Rhode Island. In 2001 he unsuccessfully represented the state before the Supreme Court in Palazzolo v. Rhode Island. The Pacific Legal Foundation represented Anthony Palazzolo, described by the New York Times as a “father of six” and a “former auto wrecker.” Anthony Palazzolo prevailed in a decision that created a higher likelihood of access to the courts for landowners seeking to prove the value of a property has been reduced due to a government regulation. 38 39

Since his election to the Senate, Whitehouse has repeatedly referenced the case and criticized PLF for becoming involved in it. In a September 5, 2018, confirmation hearing for then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Whitehouse referenced the Palazzolo decision when he questioned Kavanaugh about PLF. 40

Whitehouse began: “You will often see briefs brought by groups like for instance, the Pacific Legal Foundation. Are you familiar with that group?”41

“I’ll take your description,” replied Kavanaugh. 42

Whitehouse continued:43

“They get money from right wing conservative and corporate interests and they look for cases around the country that they believe they can use to bring arguments before the Court. I argued against them in the Supreme Court at one point, they came all the way across the country to the shores of Winnapaug Pond, Rhode Island, to hire a client whose case they could take to the Supreme Court with a purpose to make a point… and it causes me to think that sometimes the true party in interest is actually not the named party before the Court  but rather the legal group that has hired the client and brought them to the Court more or less as a prop in order to make arguments trying to direct the Court in a particular direction.” 44

Later that day, the Pacific Legal Foundation lawyer who represented Palazzolo responded in a blog post: “Of course, we didn’t hire Anthony. He hired us (for free) because after nearly forty years of trying to use his property, he understood we were the only hope he had left after he lost at the Rhode Island Supreme Court.” 45

The PLF lawyer also noted that “most of our donations come from regular people, not large “dark money” corporate donors that the Senator likes to rail against” and that the mission of public interest litigation “is about representing the Anthony Palazzolos of the world against government that has forgotten its mission is to protect the rights of the people.” 46

Recounting Whitehouse’s history of criticism, Palazzolo’s lawyer asserted that a disdain for public interest litigation was “the real reason why Senator Whitehouse doesn’t like Pacific Legal Foundation.” 47

Whitehouse resurrected his Palazzolo criticism again in July 2019, following the Supreme Court’s Knick v. Township of Scott decision, another case in which PLF successfully represented a small landowner. In an essay for The National Law Journal, Whitehouse referenced “the Pacific Legal Foundation, which handpicked the plaintiff in Knick.” The essay did not mention the name of the plaintiff—Rose Knick—and portrayed the decision in her favor as “a massive victory for the partisan donor interests seeking to control our courts.” 48

At the time of the decision, Rose Knick was a 70-year-old single retiree resisting a local township graveyard ordinance that required her to provide public access to her farm. 49

Participation in Hamilton 68 Hoax

Whitehouse involved himself as a participant in Russiagate‘s Hamilton 68 hoax that was later exposed in the Twitter Files.

In August 2017, the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) launched Hamilton 68, a digital dashboard the group promoted as an effort to “help ordinary people, journalists, and other analysts identify Russian messaging themes and detect active disinformation or attack campaigns as soon as they begin.” Explaining its methodology, ASD claimed, “our analysis has linked 600 Twitter accounts to Russian influence online.” 50 51

“Some of these accounts are directly controlled by Russia, others are users who on their own initiative reliably repeat and amplify Russian themes,” said an ASD description of the Twitter users it was tracking. 52

A January 2023 report from The Twitter Files discredited the Hamilton 68 tracking list as a media and political tool that had been used to malign right-of-center Twitter users as Russian influencers. 53

“It was a scam,” wrote Matt Taibbi in a Twitter Files report. “Instead of tracking how ‘Russia’ influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.” 54 His conclusion was based on his review of emails that took place between Twitter employees, beginning in October 2017, shortly after the launch of Hamilton 68. 55

#ReleaseTheMemo controversy

On January 18, 2018, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), then under control of Republicans, voted to allow the entire House of Representatives to review the so-called “Nunes Memo.” Written at the behest of then-U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), then the chair of the HPSCI, the classified memo was titled “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” It purported to provide evidence that the FBI had engaged in abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in its investigation of Carter Page during the 2016 presidential election. 56

Five days after the memo was circulated to HPSCI members, it was denounced by U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), an HPSCI committee member, and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) as “a misleading talking points ‘memo’ authored by Republican staff that selectively references and distorts highly classified information.” 57

Among the major allegations, the Nunes memo stated the FBI had relied upon the so-called Steele dossier to obtain permission to conduct secret surveillance of Page. Though initially promoted as legitimate by Schiff and others, the dossier was ultimately debunked as a collection of unsubstantiated claims created by a contractor being paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. 58 59 60

Though initially a classified document when circulated to the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 18, 2018, rumors of the Nunes memo’s general assertions about the Page investigation leaked to the public within hours, and a “#ReleaseTheMemo” hashtag campaign began trending on Twitter. 61

Whitehouse letter to Twitter

On January 23, Congressional Democrats issued open letters to Twitter in which they alleged Russian government propaganda, rather than organic public support from Americans, was driving the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign. 62

“Several Twitter hashtags, including #ReleaseTheMemo, calling for release of these talking points attacking the Mueller investigation were born in the hours after the Committee vote,” wrote Schiff and Feinstein. “According to the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, this effort gained the immediate attention and assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations. By Friday, January 19, 2018, the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was ‘the top trending hashtag among Twitter accounts believed to be operated by Kremlin-linked groups.’” 63

“If these reports are accurate,” they warned, “we are witnessing an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors directly acting to intervene and influence our democratic process.” 64

Later that day, in their separate open letter, U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) alleged that the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was “creating a false impression of grassroots support for partisan efforts to disrupt the Russia investigation and shut down the federal government.” 65

“We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans,” wrote Whitehouse and Blumenthal. 66

Most corporate media reports conformed to the same narrative. Showing several examples from the Washington Post and other sources, Taibbi wrote that the “national media in January and early February of 2018 denounced the Nunes report in oddly identical language, calling it a ‘joke.’” 67

During the last two weeks of January 2018 the Washington Post ran at least six news stories where the Hamilton 68 data and #ReleaseTheMemo were both mentioned. 68

The Twitter Files show the social media firm’s staff found no evidence of Russian influence over the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag and had attempted to warn Blumenthal staffers and other Democrats away from Hamilton 68 rumors. 69

Matt Taibbi reported that Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, “couldn’t find any Russian connection to #ReleaseTheMemo – at all.” 70

A Twitter report revealed by Taibbi summarized the firm’s investigation of #ReleaseTheMemo. It concluded that “engagement was overwhelmingly organic and driven by strong VIT [very important tweeter] engagement.” Among the supportive VIT’s identified by the Twitter investigation were those of Wikileaks, Donald Trump Jr., and then-U.S. Rep Steve King (R-IA). 71

The Twitter Files also show that on January 23, before the Blumenthal and Whitehouse open letter was released, a Blumenthal staffer contacted Twitter for information. 72

“I tried to warn him off this particular storyline because we don’t believe these are bots,” wrote Carlos Monje, then Twitter’s director of policy, in an internal update to other staffers. 73

Another Twitter employee advised that because there was “little reason to believe it’s a big Russian propaganda movement” that they should warn the Blumenthal staffer that “it could come back to make him look silly.” 74

“Blumenthal isn’t always looking for real and nuanced solutions,” Monje warned. “He wants to get credit for pushing us further. And he may move on only when the press moves on.” 75

And as a result, Taibbi concluded that “reporters from the AP to Politico to NBC to Rolling Stone continued to hammer the “Russian bots” theme, despite a total lack of evidence.” 76

Ethical Allegations Against Clarence Thomas

During Spring 2023, as a member of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Whitehouse made two accusations against the ethics of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas. In the first case, Whitehouse questioned the propriety of a personal relationship between the Thomas family and the family of real estate billionaire Harlan Crow. In the second, Whitehouse implied a conflict of interest regarding the political consulting work of Ginni Thomas and the judicial cases heard by her husband. 77 78

Campaign finance records show that Whitehouse has received political donations from Trammell Crow, the brother of Harlan Crow, and repeatedly spoken at events hosted by a nonprofit founded by Crow. 79 80 Additionally, records show Whitehouse has advanced legislation sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy, a left-leaning environmental nonprofit that has paid his wife more than $2.4 million in consulting fees since he became a U.S. Senator. 81 82

Harlan Crow and Thomas Family

In April 2023, Whitehouse accused Justice Thomas of committing an “embarrassment for the federal judiciary” after ProPublica reported that Thomas had not publicly disclosed family vacations he had taken with billionaire Texas developer Harlan Crow. Citing mutual acquaintances of both men, ProPublica stated Thomas and Crow were “genuine friends.” The report also featured photos of both men and their families during a 2019 trip to Indonesia that had been paid for by Crow. ProPublica estimated the value of the trip for the Thomas family to have been as much as $500,000. 83 84

“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over 25 years,” said Thomas, in a statement after the story was revealed. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them. Early in my tenure at the court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable.” 85

In a statement sent to ProPublica, Crow referred to Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, as “very dear friends” since 1996, and said the “hospitality we have extended to the Thomas’s over the years is no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.” Crow also wrote that Clarence and Ginni Thomas had never asked for his hospitality; that Crow had never tried to influence Thomas on any political or legal issue; that he was unaware of any other participants on the trips attempting to influence Thomas; and that he would “never invite” a guest if he thought there would be an attempt to influence Thomas. “These are gatherings of friends,” Crow reiterated. 86

In March 2023, according to the Washington Times, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and federal circuit court judges adopted new ethics rules requiring “Supreme Court justices as well as other federal judges” to “disclose gifts and travel funded by a third party.” In his April 2023 response to the ProPublica report, Thomas wrote of the changes, saying “it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future.” 87

Whitehouse and Trammell Crow

Following Whitehouse’s statements regarding Clarence and Ginni Thomas and Harlan Crow, the Daily Caller reported that Trammell Crow, Harlan Crow’s brother, had given $10,400 since 2017 to Whitehouse’s U.S. Senate campaign account. Federal campaign records also show an additional $5,000 in 2019 given by Trammel Crow to Oceans PAC, Whitehouse’s federal leadership fund. The Daily Caller also reported multiple instances of Whitehouse assisting EarthX, an environmental nonprofit founded by Trammell Crow. 88 89 90

Whitehouse was listed as a speaker at the 2019 and 2020 Earth Day Texas events, run by EarthX. And at the 2018 event, a staffer from Whitehouse’s senate office and his wife, Sandra Whitehouse, were scheduled speakers. 91

“I went to Earth Day Texas, a truly impressive event, with 150,000 people, making it the largest Earth Day event in the world,” said Sen. Whitehouse, during a 2017 speech on the floor of the Senate. “It is the passion of businessman and philanthropist Trammell Crow, who has been bringing Republicans and Democrats together to combat climate change since 2011.” 92

Ginni Thomas Consulting Business

In May 2023, Sheldon Whitehouse alleged there were “potentially criminal aspects” involved in consulting payments made by Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway to Ginni Thomas in January 2012. 93

Beginning in the early 1980s, prior to her marriage to Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas worked in Washington D.C. as an aide to former U.S. Rep. Hal Daub (R – NE). She remained a political professional after her marriage to Thomas and his elevation to the Supreme Court. She has been a senior aide to former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Army (R-TX); a lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and a board member for many right-of-center nonprofits and causes. In 2010 she created Liberty Consulting, through which she does some of her work. 94

“Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America,” she told the Washington Free Beacon, during a March 2022 interview. “But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.” 95

“Besides coalition work and bridge-building, I help provide friendly, constructive advice and counsel on messaging or projects that would appeal to the public,” she said of Liberty Consulting, in the 2022 interview. 96

In May 2023, the Washington Post reported that Liberty Consulting had received $80,000 from Kellyanne Conway’s Polling Company during the year ending June 2012. 97

In January 2012, according to documents the newspaper claimed to have, right-of-center judicial reform activist Leonard Leo asked Conway to send a bill to the Judicial Education Project (JEP) for $25,000 and then provide “another $25k” to Ginni Thomas. Leo also asked that Conway not reference Thomas in the payment. 98

The Judicial Education Project is a nonprofit that was advised by Leo in 2012. The JEP also submitted a brief in a voting rights case that was in front of the U.S. Supreme Court during 2012. 99

According to the Washington Post, the documents it was able to review showed Conway’s Polling Company listed “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” as the reason for billing JEP. The newspaper did not obtain documents revealing the nature of the business arrangement between the Polling Company and Ginni Thomas’s Liberty Consulting, nor any documentation explaining work done by Liberty Consulting for the Polling Company’s JEP account. 100

“It is no secret that Ginni Thomas has a long history of working on issues within the conservative movement, and part of that work has involved gauging public attitudes and sentiment. The work she did here did not involve anything connected with either the Court’s business or with other legal issues,” said Leo in May 2023, regarding the 2012 business arrangement. “As an advisor to JEP I have long been supportive of its opinion research relating to limited government, and The Polling Company, along with Ginni Thomas’s help, has been an invaluable resource for gauging public attitudes.” 101

“Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni,” said Leo, explaining to the newspaper why he asked to keep her name off the 2012 paperwork. 102

Sheldon Whitehouse told an MSNBC interviewer in May 2023 that he believed the 2012 payments involving Ginni Thomas may have resulted in a “violation of the tax code” and “conceivably even fraud.” 103

Sandra Whitehouse Consulting Business

Since September 2008, according to her LinkedIn account and records from federal nonprofit tax filings, Sandra Thornton Whitehouse, the wife of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, has received contracting work totaling $3.1 million from two environmental nonprofits.

Tax documents for September 2008 through June 2022 from the Ocean Conservancy show that for every year since the reporting period ending June 2010 Sandra Whitehouse (or her consulting firm, Ocean Wonks LLC) was one of the nonprofit’s five highest paid consultants. Total payments during that period equaled $2,628,654. (Whitehouse’s LinkedIn account shows she became a senior policy advisor for the group in September 2008, but tax records do not list her as one of the five highest paid consultants for the year ending September 2009. She may have been paid money during that year that is in addition to the previously mentioned $2.6 million but fell outside the publicly-reportable “top five highest paid” consultants.) 104 105

In May 2023, after Sheldon Whitehouse raised objections to Ginni Thomas’s consulting work, the Daily Caller reported that while his wife was working for the Ocean Conservancy, Sen. Whitehouse had “blogged for Ocean Conservancy, spoke at an event it co-hosted, and sat on a panel an organization director moderated.” 106

Additionally, according to the Daily Caller, Whitehouse introduced “at least two dozen bills” relating to ocean research and left leaning ocean causes. These included a 2021 bill to “improve data collection and monitoring of the Great Lakes, oceans, bays, estuaries, and coasts,” a 2019 proposal to “prohibit oil and gas leasing on the Outer Continental Shelf,” and the Ocean Conservancy-endorsed Save Our Seas Act 2.0 in 2020. 107

In 2020, one of the Ocean Conservancy’s executives publicly thanked Whitehouse in a blog post for his “continued leadership” regarding the Save Our Seas measure. 108

In addition to the Ocean Conservancy contract, Sandra Whitehouse was also one of the top-five highest paid contractors to AltaSea, or AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles, from July 2015 to July 2018. Tax records for the environmental nonprofit show a cumulative total of $489,704 paid by AltaSea to Sandra Whitehouse during the period. 109 110

Sheldon Whitehouse became a U.S. Senator in January 2007. Sandra Whitehouse received her PhD in marine biology in 1994. As of May 2023, her LinkedIn account does not list employment prior to 2008. 111

A speaker program for a May 2012 symposium states she had been an “environmental consultant” for the prior 15 years (i.e.: back to 2007), with “clients” including the Rhode Island General Assembly. As late as March 2004, an individual named “Sandra Whitehouse” appeared to be employed as a member of the policy staff of the Rhode Island House of Representatives. She and two other individuals represented the policy office in “House Policy Staff Briefings” before the Rhode Island House Committee on Separation of Powers. 112 113 114

Ms. Whitehouse has also been listed as a non-resident senior fellow at the controversial Atlantic Council. 115

Other Controversies

Past Fossil-Fuel Holdings

In April 2012, Whitehouse began a weekly “climate speech” in the Senate chamber, delivering both his belief in catastrophic climate change and denouncing the fossil-fuel industry for causing it. 116 In one of these speeches at the end of that year, he praised a student-led campaign to force universities to divest from stocks in the fossil-fuel industry and denounced  Congress for being “lulled” by “the narcotic of corporate money—corporate money out of the polluters and their allies.” 117

Rhode Island media revealed that while Whitehouse was making those speeches, he had owned “tens of thousands of dollars” worth of stock in Duke Energy, a major supplier of electricity from coal-fired power plants. Additionally, it was revealed, Whitehouse’s financial-disclosure forms going back through 1998 showed significant stock holdings in oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch (Shell), and Phillips Petroleum. Confronted with the report, Whitehouse issued a statement clarifying he had sold his Duke Energy stock in February 2013 – after he had dressed down his fellow lawmakers for imbibing the “narcotic” of money from “polluters.” 118

Stock Trading

In October 2017, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, a left-wing advocacy organization founded by Ralph Nader, referred to Whitehouse as “one of the Senate’s more prolific players in the stock market,” and an example of those with “a high propensity for trading stocks in businesses they directly oversee from their committees.” Members of Congress sometimes obtain valuable investment information before it is known by the general public, putting the politician in position to personally benefit by purchasing (or selling) stocks and other assets related to that special knowledge. Whitehouse has repeatedly been the subject of news reports regarding this behavior. 119

Whitehouse sold a substantial amount of stock in the immediate advance of the stock-market collapses which triggered the 2008 financial crisis. Whitehouse and other members of Congress allegedly received the details of a briefing from then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on September 16, 2008, demonstrating financial markets and the economy were in much-greater peril than was then understood. Business Insider reported that Whitehouse sold off between $250,000 and $600,000 of his personal investment holdings within a week of this briefing, avoiding losses of 15 to 40 percent that would hit those securities over the next month. 120 121

In January 2017, Kaiser Health News (KHN) reported that Whitehouse was one of six Senators trading stocks in health and biomedical companies while serving on committees overseeing health-care and health-coverage issues. Of the six, Whitehouse and his family were revealed as the largest holders of such assets, owning between $400,000 and $1.3 million, according to the then-most-recent disclosures. 122

A May 2017 Politico investigation revealed Whitehouse, a member of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee, purchased shares in three pharmaceutical companies ten days before the November 2016 public roll-out of a major bill to speed up the FDA’s drug-approval process. The purchases occurred while lawmakers on relevant committees and drug-industry lobbyists seeking the reform were hammering out details of the proposal behind closed doors, before making it public. Whitehouse and his wife purchased more shares of one of the companies as the proposal passed the U.S. House, and then began selling their stake ten days after President Barack Obama signed the bill into law. 123

In response to the report, Whitehouse claimed his stockbroker made his trading decisions without his input. Politico noted that some U.S. Senators, such as former Utah Republican Orrin Hatch and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, put their investments in a blind trust while in office to avoid the perception of trading on inside knowledge but that Whitehouse did not. 124

Groundless Brett Kavanaugh Allegations

During the September 2018 confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Jeffrey Catalan, a Rhode Island resident, called Whitehouse’s U.S. Senate office claiming he knew of a rape allegedly committed by Kavanaugh on a boat in Rhode Island during 1985. Catalan also claimed that shortly after the alleged rape, he had both confronted and physically assaulted Kavanaugh as part of an act of vigilante justice for the supposed rape victim. 125 Three months prior to the making this call, Catalan had started a Twitter account, identifying himself as a Rhode Island resident, and filled it with statements denouncing Republicans and President Trump; some appeared to call for a military coup. 126

Whitehouse’s office submitted Catalan’s claim to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which led to law enforcement questioning him. Kavanaugh categorically denied both the incident and any interaction with Catalan. 127 Shortly thereafter, Catalan recanted his story,128 which observers called “groundless.” 129

When a Rhode Island news outlet later asked Whitehouse’s office “what steps” were taken by them to confirm the validity of the allegation, the Senator’s office refused to provide an answer. 130

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) made a criminal referral of Catalan to the U.S. Department of Justice for investigation for making false statements. Whitehouse responded by accusing Republicans of throwing Catalan “under the bus,” and concluding “I hope when things calm down a little bit, there will be appropriate apologies made to our constituent.” 131

Whitehouse voted against Kavanaugh’s confirmation. 132

All-White Beach Club

One current and another former officer in the Providence, R.I., chapter of the NAACP criticized Whitehouse in September 2017 for his membership in a private Rhode Island beach club that allegedly had no African-American members. 133 Whitehouse had reportedly pledged in 2006, during his first campaign for the U.S. Senate, that he would break off his affiliation with both Bailey’s Beach Club and the supposedly “all-male, all-white Bellevue Avenue Reading Room.” 134

But in August 2017, Rhode Island news website GoLocalProv reported Whitehouse was both still attending Bailey’s, and had transferred his membership shares to his wife. 135 The media account stated this made the Whitehouses (with 25 shares) some of the largest stakeholders in a club where America’s “wealthiest and most influential” families might own just five or ten shares. 136

After his office had refused to answer questions regarding the matter, Whitehouse was confronted on camera by GoLocalProv. He claimed not to remember when he consolidated ownership shares with his wife, and – regarding the club’s racial diversity – declared he would “take that up privately.” He then ended the discussion. 137

GoLocalProv confronted Whitehouse again about the beach club membership in June 2021, just before the first federally recognized Juneteenth holiday, which commemorates the day of slavery emancipation. In an on-camera interview, Whitehouse was reminded by the GoLocalProv reporter of his history regarding the club and that his wife had become “one of the largest shareholders,” and then asked if the club had admitted any non-white members.138

“I think the people who are running the place are still working on that and I’m sorry it hasn’t happened yet,” replied Whitehouse, who then began walking away from the interview.139

In a lone follow-up question, the reporter asked if an “elite, all white, wealthy club” should still exist in the 21st Century. “It’s a long tradition in Rhode Island and there are many of them and I think we just need to work our way through the issues, thank you,” answered Whitehouse.140

Misleading Advertising

The Washington Post Fact Checker awarded Whitehouse its highest rating for a single deceptive political claim, “Four Pinocchios,” in October 2018. 141 Whitehouse alleged that Congressional Republicans “say they have got to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.” The Post ruled no such idea had been proposed. The analysis further noted that (excepting for a McConnell statement regarding a hypothetical bi-partisan, major reform plan that would need buy-in from Democrats) Republicans were not even contemplating spending reductions. 142

The Post report declared Whitehouse “has no evidence to support his incendiary campaign claim that Republicans want to eliminate these programs” and deemed it “especially bad” that the statement was made by Whitehouse himself (as opposed to a voiceover by someone else on his behalf) in a campaign advertisement for a race where he was winning comfortably. Whitehouse was then polling 24 percentage points ahead of his Republican opponent, and would win by 23 points. 143

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