- Fingers
- Posts
- Stupid status bottles for a (former) senator
Stupid status bottles for a (former) senator
Plus: New [Redactables]!
Dave Infante
July 16, 2025
Programming note: No Weekender this Sunday—I’m taking it off to celebrate my birthday, which is technically today. In lieu of gifts, please buy a gift subscription for somebody who should be reading the boozeletter. Fingers will be back in your inbox next week!—Dave.
Kyrsten Sinema is no longer a United States Senator, which is for the best. But even in retirement she remains true to the mores that guided her career in the upper chamber: drinking wine, doing corruption, and generally carrying on like the reactionary Gen X dipshit that she is. Even though Sinema is no longer in, nor even running for, office, she’s still got a whole lot of cash left over in her election coffers from last cycle. But rest assured, she’s working on it. Per a report yesterday by Dave Levinthal at NOTUS, Sinema’s “campaign committee spent more than $391,000 between March 31 and June 30, according to FEC filings.” Seems very normal and good!
And: relevant to our interests. Because among the stuff Arizona’s private equity-captured, constituent-betraying former senator has been splurging said industry’s money on this year is a bunch of wine. Levinthal (emphasis mine throughout):
Sinema — who once moonlighted as the nation’s most powerful winery intern — also spent $572.67 in April at Three Sticks Wines in Sonoma, California, where she conducted her internship. Stated reason: “Meeting expenses.”
Sinema’s other wine-themed campaign expenditures since April include $691.70 for “event supplies” at the Valley Wine Merchant in Newber[g], Oregon; $314.93 for “event catering” at Total Wine & More in Phoenix; $245.83 for “donor appreciation supplies” at Total Wine in Bethesda, Maryland, and $195.75 at the Postino WineCafe in Phoenix for “meeting meals.”
The Democrat-turned-independent left the Senate in January and, in March, joined law and lobbying firm Hogan Lovells as senior counsel in the global regulatory and intellectual property practice. Representatives at Hogan Lovells did not respond to a request for comment.
Three Sticks, you should know, is owned by the founder of TPG Capital,2 one of the world’s largest private-equity firms, with over $220 billion in assets under management and a lobbying bill that regularly tops nine figures in Washington, D.C. alone. Sinema’s two-week “internship” at the winery as a sitting senator (annual salary: $174,000) in the summer of 2020 netted her $1,117.40. Between 2019-2024, her campaign committee raked in over $55,000 from affiliates of Three Sticks’ owner’s PE firm. Good work, if you can get it!
Obviously, this is deeply embarrassing, both for the people of Arizona who promoted Sinema into the position of undeserved power from which she immediately began feathering her bed with blood money, and the rest of us in the United States who live under a legal code that actually may not even explicitly prohibit such flagrant grift.3 But the news is grim enough as it is these days. So instead of considering the democracy-destroying effects of compounding elite impunity, let’s have a little fun. What kind of stupid status bottles do we think Sinema has been buying on her PE masters’ tab?
Reply