By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
For years, David Trone has offered voters a reassuring story: when he went to Congress, he walked away from Total Wine & More, the liquor retail empire that made him a billionaire, and left it in the hands of professional management. A CEO was running the company. He was focused on serving Maryland.
The public record tells a different story.
A review of LinkedIn profiles, court records, state regulatory filings, tax returns, and corporate documents by MDBayNews found that Total Wine operated without a Chief Executive Officer for approximately five years — from the departure of Kevin Peters in late 2016 or early 2017 until Troy Rice was elevated to the role in 2022. During that entire period, Trone was serving in Congress, collecting millions in income from the company, and repeatedly assuring reporters, regulators, and voters that a CEO was running Total Wine independently of him.
Neither Trone’s campaign nor Total Wine responded to requests for comment.
The Claim
The narrative of clean separation has been central to Trone’s political identity across multiple campaigns.
When questions arose during his 2024 Senate run about political contributions made by Total Wine’s parent company, Retail Services and Systems, to anti-abortion Republicans — including more than $80,000 to Georgia legislators who passed a six-week abortion ban — his campaign offered a consistent defense: Trone wasn’t involved. A CEO was running the company.
“David Trone stepped down as CEO of Total Wine in 2015 and was not involved with these contributions,” campaign spokesperson Jared DeWese told TIME magazine in August 2023.
Total Wine itself reinforced the point in the same article, telling TIME that “the company has been run by the CEO and a team of seasoned, professional retail leaders” since Trone gave up his role as president.
The same claim appeared in responses to the Washington Free Beacon and the American Prospect, both of which reported in 2023 and 2024 that Trone had maintained extensive formal titles across Total Wine entities throughout his congressional tenure — director, president, secretary, treasurer, manager, co-manager, and co-president across eight entities, including the parent company — while simultaneously claiming no operational involvement.
Now, as Trone mounts a 2026 primary challenge against incumbent Rep. April McClain Delaney in Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, the question of who was actually running Total Wine during his time in Congress takes on renewed relevance.
The Record
The timeline of Total Wine’s executive leadership, reconstructed from public records, reveals a significant gap at the top of the company during the years Trone was in Congress.
David Trone stepped down as CEO in 2015 and as president in late 2016, according to his own public statements and multiple press accounts. In April 2016, Total Wine announced that Kevin Peters, the former president of Office Depot North America, had been named CEO effective January 1 of that year and had assumed day-to-day leadership of the company.
Peters did not last. According to a source with direct knowledge of Total Wine’s internal operations — whose identity has been verified by MDBayNews but who spoke on condition of anonymity — Peters departed within approximately a year, and his departure was directly related to his relationship with David Trone.
After Peters left, Total Wine did not name a replacement CEO. Instead, according to the source, the company operated under what was described internally as an “office of the CEO” structure, with Thomas Haubenstricker, the company’s Chief Financial Officer, serving as the de facto operational leader.
LinkedIn records confirm that Haubenstricker held the title of CFO — not CEO — at Total Wine from January 2015 through October 2024, a span of nearly ten years. He never held the CEO title.
Troy Rice’s LinkedIn profile shows he joined Total Wine in November 2017 as Chief Stores Officer, was promoted to Chief Operations Officer in April 2021, and was finally elevated to Chief Executive Officer in 2022 — a title he held until departing in August 2025 to become CEO of PGA Tour Superstore. Rice was succeeded by Ryan Ross, who became Total Wine’s CEO effective January 2026.
The gap is unambiguous: from Peters’ departure in 2016 or early 2017 until Rice’s promotion to CEO in 2022, no one held the Chief Executive Officer title at Total Wine & More.
What Haubenstricker Was Actually Doing
The characterization of Haubenstricker as a CFO managing routine financial matters understates his actual role during the gap years, according to court records and corporate filings reviewed by MDBayNews.
In a 2023 employment discrimination case — Kasmir v. Retail Services & Systems, Inc., heard by the Appellate Court of Maryland — Haubenstricker is identified as the senior decisionmaker in a personnel matter involving a director-level employee. The court record describes him as the executive who, along with Troy Rice, made the final determination to restructure the employee’s position. That is the kind of organizational authority that would typically rest with a CEO.
Beyond Total Wine’s internal operations, Haubenstricker served as the president and sole board member of Coloradans for Liquor Fairness, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization that David and Robert Trone each funded with more than $1 million in 2022 to campaign for a Colorado ballot measure that would have allowed Total Wine to expand its store count in the state without limit. The organization reported $13.7 million in total revenue and spent all of it on the campaign.
Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission records from December 2018 show Haubenstricker listed as a co-trustee of SPT 2015 LLC Receiving Trust, one of the Trone family holding trusts with ownership stakes in Total Wine’s Tennessee operations. State regulatory filings from California similarly show Haubenstricker listed as Secretary and Treasurer of California Fine Wine & Spirits, a Total Wine state entity.
The picture that emerges is not of an independent financial executive managing the books at arm’s length from the owners, but of a figure deeply embedded in the Trone family’s business, political, and estate planning structures — deployed as the senior operational leader of a multibillion-dollar company during a period when that company’s co-owner was telling the public a CEO was in charge.
A Pattern of Misleading Claims
The CEO gap is not an isolated discrepancy. It is part of a consistent pattern in which Trone’s public claims about his separation from Total Wine have diverged from documented reality.
The Washington Free Beacon reported in May 2024 that despite claiming to have “relinquished all operational responsibility” when he took office in 2019, Trone had maintained formal titles — director, president, secretary, treasurer, manager, co-manager, and co-president — across eight Total Wine entities as of 2022, the most recent year for which financial disclosures were available. He reported Total Wine & More as his place of employment on Federal Election Commission filings for campaign contributions made during the 2022 election cycle.
In 2021, Trone submitted a signed and notarized questionnaire to the Arizona Department of Liquor Licenses and Control as part of Total Wine’s application for a new store in Goodyear, identifying himself as a “controlling person” of the company. His stated employer on that document: “U.S. Government.” His position: “Congressman.”
During a visit to a Total Wine location in Tempe, Arizona, in December 2021, Trone allegedly threatened to “execute” and “end” a delivery worker for placing merchandise on the floor during business hours, according to a police report cited by multiple news outlets.
In 2022, Trone and his brother each spent more than $1 million funding a ballot initiative in Colorado to loosen that state’s liquor laws — an effort that would have directly benefited Total Wine’s ability to expand in the state.
Throughout all of this, his standard response to questions about involvement in Total Wine remained consistent: he had stepped back, and a CEO was running the company.
Why It Matters Now
Trone lost the 2024 Democratic Senate primary to Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, who went on to win the general election and become Maryland’s first Black U.S. Senator. He spent approximately $62.9 million of his own money on that race.
In December 2025, he announced he would challenge McClain Delaney in the 2026 Democratic primary for Maryland’s 6th Congressional District — the seat he had vacated to run for Senate, and which he had publicly endorsed McClain Delaney to fill before reversing course.
The core of his political brand remains unchanged: he is a self-funder beholden to no one, whose wealth insulates him from the corrupting influence of special interest money. “When someone takes money from PACs, someone takes money from lobbyists, and corporations, those folks aren’t just writing those checks out of the goodness of their heart,” he told a Baltimore-area radio show during his Senate campaign. “I just spend my own money, because I give a damn about trying to change the system.”
That argument depends on a clean separation between his political identity and his business empire. The public record suggests that separation has never been as clean as he has claimed.
MDBayNews contacted both Trone’s campaign and Total Wine & More with specific questions about the company’s executive leadership between Kevin Peters’ departure and Troy Rice’s 2022 appointment as CEO. Neither responded within 48 hours. If they do, an update will be provided.
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