Demo­c­ra­t­ic ‘dark mon­ey’ crit­ic Shel­don White­house has deep ties to secret donor world

Sen. Shel­don White­house (D‑RI) has long been the Left­’s fore­most crit­ic of “dark mon­ey,” which he’s said “cor­rupts” pol­i­tics and pos­es a “threat to democ­ra­cy.”
But a Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er review of the sen­a­tor’s donors, green ener­gy affil­i­a­tions, and efforts to trans­form the Supreme Court tell anoth­er sto­ry. He has for many years ben­e­fit­ed from the influ­ence of dark mon­ey and held cer­tain ties to dark mon­ey groups.
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Since 2010, White­house has helped intro­duce the DISCLOSE Act, which has not been passed and would require 501(c)(4) non­prof­it groups and Super PACs spend­ing mon­ey on fed­er­al elec­tions to report their donors of more than $10,000 in a giv­en cycle. More recent­ly, White­house has tak­en aim at Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas over the con­ser­v­a­tive’s pur­port­ed dark mon­ey affil­i­a­tions, includ­ing with Leonard Leo, chair­man of the pub­lic rela­tions firm CRC Advi­sors, and well as co-chair­man of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, a pow­er­ful right-lean­ing legal group. The sen­a­tor has also slammed con­ser­v­a­tive Jus­tice Samuel Ali­to over his rela­tion­ship with hedge fund bil­lion­aire Paul Singer.
White­house accused Sen­ate Repub­li­cans in 2022 of car­ry­ing water for “megadonors and secre­tive spe­cial inter­ests to pro­tect the most cor­rupt­ing force in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics — dark mon­ey,” upon the law­mak­ers block­ing the DISCLOSE Act. That sen­ti­ment has­n’t deterred the Democ­ra­t’s cam­paign, j …