Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a frequent critic of Wall Street, recently purchased thousands of dollars in shares of Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs, records show.
Whitehouse purchased up to $15,000 worth of shares in the investment banking company Goldman Sachs in late June, according to a financial disclosure report he submitted to the Senate this week. The stock buy comes on the heels of Whitehouse informing the upper chamber in his annual report last year that his wife, Sandra Whitehouse, owns shares in Goldman Sachs, while the senator himself disclosed having as much as $250,000 in shares and also Goldman Sachs mutual funds.
Whitehouse’s investment comes as the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee has long positioned himself as one of the loudest voices in the Senate criticizing Wall Street. He’s called to rein in interest rates for credit cards to “protect citizens from Wall Street greed” and accused Wall Street of unethically profiting from “Big Oil” allegedly engaging in price gouging.
Whitehouse held a Senate hearing in June called “Making Wall Street Pay Its Fair Share: Raising Revenue, Strengthening Our Economy” in which he said Wall Street too often “profits from trickery like stock buybacks that reward CEOs and wealthy shareholders, trickery which surged following the Trump corporate tax cut.” In the hearing, Whitehouse said the 2008 financial crisis was caused by “Wall Street’s reckless speculation.” Goldman Sachs notably agreed in 2010 to settle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to the tune of $550 million after being accused of securities fraud. Writing in Rolling Stone in 2010, journalist Matt Taibbi famously criticized Goldman Sachs for its alleged role in the financial crisis, calling the bank “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
“Sheldon Whitehouse, like every other senator, should be scrutinized where his personal finances intersect with the immense legislative authority he wields,” said Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center think tank.
It’s not the first time Whitehouse has invested in an industry that he often slams. The senator also disclosed in his most recent annual financial disclosure that Whitehouse and his wife own up to $919,000 in shares of companies he calls out for allegedly preying on customers through “shrinkflation,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. Some of those companies include PepsiCo, Walmart, Procter & Gamble, and ConAgra.
Whitehouse, as the Washington Examiner reported, often takes aim at so-called dark money in politics but accepts campaign donations from dark money groups. He’s also been accused of hypocrisy for raising concerns about Republicans harboring conflicts of interest in connection to the Supreme Court despite introducing bills that could benefit his wife’s energy firm Running Tide.
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“Whitehouse’s campaign against Wall Street is apparently very similar to his campaign against the Supreme Court: He has no objection to the institutions as long as he and his friends remain in control of them,” Thayer argued.
A spokesperson for Whitehouse told the Washington Examiner the senator and his wife have an account manager who trades stocks independently “without any input from the senator or his family.”
