An Exhaustive Timeline of Our New Acting Attorney General's Astoundingly Crooked Career

It seems like in this era, the more blatant something is, the easier it is to get away with. Take, for example, President Trump's appointment of a guy who used to defend him against Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe on CNN to...oversee the probe. This is like appointing Jeffrey Lord to run a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade. It's almost like Trump's base of support has agreed to let him do anything—like, say, obstruct justice and destroy the rule of law—as long as he comes right out and does it in public. Or, you know, they just don't give a damn.

Matthew Whitaker was elevated to acting attorney general after the president shit-canned Jeff Sessions, whom El Jefe has hated ever since Sessions did perhaps the only honorable thing in his miserable public career and recused himself from overseeing an investigation into the Trump campaign—a campaign that Sessions himself served on. In the Before Times, this was known as a conflict of interest. The president's beef was that the attorney general then could not protect him from the Russia probe—as if the AG is his personal lawyer, rather than the nation's chief law-enforcement officer.

Now he's found a guy, in Whitaker, to defend him against the investigation who's talked publicly about ways to torpedo it.

View full post on Youtube

Trump passed over multiple Senate-confirmed candidates for the "acting" AG position and tapped Whitaker in a move that even George W. Bush torture lawyer John Yoo says is unconstitutional. The state of Maryland is suing over the move, contending the same. The Justice Department released a memo Wednesday defending the legality of Whitaker's appointment.

But how, exactly, did we get here? How the hell did Whitaker get anywhere near the attorney general's office, when not too long ago he was peddling hot tubs for a company that was shut down for defrauding customers?

Below, there's a little timeline of Whitaker's life. It paints a picture of a Trump loyalist and longtime Republican operative who has repeatedly attacked the Mueller investigation he is now overseeing and defended those under investigation; who has close ties to people intimately involved in the investigation; who was described as the White House's "eyes and ears" in the Justice Department when he was Jeff Sessions's chief of staff; who proved himself willing to politicize federal investigations as a U.S. attorney; who participated in scams and grifts in his business dealings; who has crackpot views on constitutional law; and who got into this racket by defending the president on television.

October 29, 1969: Whitaker was born in Des Moines, Iowa. That makes him 49.

Early 1990s: He attended the University of Iowa, where he played football—including in the 1991 Rose Bowl game. According to the Cedar Rapids Gazette, he once wanted to be a "movie mogul" after graduation.

1995: Whitaker graduated from law school and worked at regional firms and in corporate law before jumping into Republican politics.

2002: He reached out to an old friend from law school, Charles Larson, Jr.—who'd since become chairman of the Iowa Republican Party—and decided to run for Iowa state treasurer. He toured Iowa's 99 counties and campaigned with Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley, but lost to a longtime Democratic incumbent.

June 15, 2004: On the recommendation of Grassley, and despite having no experience in law enforcement, Whitaker was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa by President George W. Bush. "The most important cases Mr. Whitaker cited in his questionnaire to the Senate Judiciary Committee," The New York Times reports, "dealt with a personal injury claim and breaches of contracts."

"Iowans knew him as a star football player, of course," Grassley told the Times.

2005-2007: Whitaker oversaw the prosecution of a case against Iowa State Senator Matt McCoy—a gay, liberal Democrat—alleging McCoy tried to extort $2,000. As a Des Moines Register opinion columnist put it, the case "was based on the word of a man former associates depicted as a drug user, a deadbeat and an abuser of women; a man so shady even his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsors called him a 'pathological liar.'" The jury acquitted McCoy after 25 minutes of deliberation, a stark departure from the 90-percent conviction rate in federal cases. U.S. attorneys in Whitaker's office also neglected to mention during court proceedings that the FBI had paid the witness to tape his conversations with McCoy.

As McCoy would later put it in an op-ed for Politico, the investigation "was part of what would come to be widely considered a politically motivated effort by the Department of Justice to investigate Democratic officeholders."

November 2009-2017: Whitaker left his job as U.S. attorney when President Barack Obama's replacement was confirmed. He went on to serve as a partner at the small general practice firm Whitaker Hagenow & Gustoff LLP in Des Moines.

2011: Whitaker was one of 61 candidates for three spots on the Iowa Supreme Court. He got an interview, but was eliminated from consideration early in the process.

2012: He served in the Iowa branch of the presidential campaigns of Republicans Tim Pawlenty and, subsequently, Rick Perry.

2012: Whitaker and two partners purchased an affordable-housing development in Des Moines through their company, MEM Investment. It did not, according to Time, go well:

While in private business, acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker walked away from a taxpayer-subsidized apartment-rehabilitation project in Iowa after years of cost overruns, delays and other problems, public records show.

The city of Des Moines ultimately yanked an affordable housing loan that Whitaker’s company had been awarded, and another lender began foreclosure proceedings after Whitaker defaulted on a separate loan for nearly $700,000. Several contractors complained they were not paid, and a process server for one contractor could not even find Whitaker or his company to serve him with a lawsuit.

Unpaid contractors? No wonder he got a gig from Donald Trump.

2014: Whitaker was a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the retiring Tom Harkin. He lost out on the Republican nomination to Joni Ernst and her ad about castrating hogs. In a debate, he suggested he would only vote for judges who had "a biblical worldview," and that "secular" judges could be unfit to serve.

(As a reminder, the First Amendment to the Constitution declares, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," which Thomas Jefferson clarified was intended to construct a wall between church and state.)

May 21, 2014: As a Senate candidate, Whitaker gave an interview to a site called Caffeinated Thoughts in which he suggested Marbury vs. Madison—the foundational Supreme Court decision that found the Court is the final arbiter of constitutional issues—was wrongly decided. This is, to say the least, an extreme viewpoint in the context of American jurisprudence. If the Supreme Court isn't tasked with deciding what's ultimately constitutional, what is the Court's purpose?

But Whitaker also suggested the Court should not have upheld various pieces of New Deal legislation, which might include the Social Security or Fair Labor Standards Acts. That would seem to be in conflict with his claim the Court should not have final say on what laws are constitutional—a view that is itself, again, totally bonkers.

He also said the Department of Education should be disbanded, said he's never supported raising any tax ever, and backed canning the graduated income tax in favor of the flat tax. He did concede climate change may be real, though he opposed efforts to deal with it.

2014: After his failed Senate bid, Whitaker became campaign chairman for Sam Clovis, who was running for state treasurer. Clovis failed in that bid, but subsequently became Donald Trump's national campaign co-chairman in 2016. That didn't go so well, either: Clovis was later listed an unnamed "campaign supervisor" in the special counsel's indictment of Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, and said in a May 2018 radio interview that he'd been interviewed by the Mueller's investigators and testified before the grand jury that Mueller convened.

So the person now overseeing Mueller's investigation is closely tied to one of the witnesses in that investigation, and who was named in an indictment produced by the investigation.

2014: Whitaker joined the board of World Patent Marketing, an invention promotion firm that turned out to be the World's Biggest Scam. Essentially, the company's business model was to take inventors' money, tell them they were getting their patents approved and their products marketed, but actually doing none of that and pocketing the money. WPM "simply took cash without ever meeting or reviewing any pitches" and "virtually none of the firm’s clients ever made money." For this, the Federal Trade Commission fined the group $26 million and banned the founder from doing business in the field.

WaPo's Dana Milbank reported that WPM's work included claiming there was "DNA evidence collected in 2013 proves that Bigfoot does exist," asserting that "time travel" could be "possible, perhaps within the next decade," and announced, in the same press release trumpeting Whitaker's appointment to the board, that they'd secured a patent for a "masculine toilet." They even included a measurement for the size of "average male genitalia," suggesting their product was "for those of us who measure longer than that."

But Whitaker wasn't just on the board. He could be found promoting hot-tub designs:

View full post on X

And perhaps most importantly, he could be found using his résumé as a former U.S. attorney to threaten clients who intended to go public about how World Patent Marketing had scammed them. In August 2015, the Miami New Times tells us, Whitaker decided to go after one possible client himself, sending a threatening letter from his official firm account:

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the current acting attorney general in a previous life, leveraging his career in federal law enforcement to run protection for a criminal enterprise.

May 10, 2017: By 2017, the FTC had levied millions of fines on WPM and shuttered it as a scam.

Whitaker then penned an op-ed in The Hill defending Trump's firing of James Comey, which prompted the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as "the right decision." Trump said on national television he fired Comey over "the Russia thing"—an apparent admission it was an attempt to obstruct justice—and told the two Russian ambassadors he hosted in the Oval Office the next day that firing Comey the "nut job" had eased the pressure of he investigation. Even if you disregard all that, this indicates Whitaker's opposition to Mueller's appointment in the first place.

June 9, 2017: Whitaker declared in a radio interview that "there is no criminal obstruction of justice charge to be had here [against the president]." That is one of the charges under investigation by the special counsel's office that Whitaker is now overseeing.

July 13, 2017: Whitaker defended the infamous Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, a Kremlin-linked lawyer, and a number of others. The incident is under scrutiny as part of the Russia probe.

July 26, 2017: The same month The New York Times broke the story of the infamous Trump Tower meeting, Whitaker really went for it on CNN.

WHITAKER: And that's why those same code of federal regulations govern the budget of the special counsel and that is well within the purview of the attorney general. So I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced, it would recess appointment and that attorney general doesn't fire Bob Mueller but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigations grinds to almost a halt.

The guy who suggested this is now the acting attorney general.

July 27, 2017: Before he locked his Twitter account, Fortune found Whitaker had tweeted that any effort by Congress to protect Mueller’s role would be "a mistake."

August 8, 2017: Whitaker penned an op-ed for CNN headlined, "Mueller's investigation of Trump is going too far." Here's the lede:

Last month, when President Donald Trump was asked by The New York Times if special counsel Robert Mueller would be crossing a line if he started investigating the finances of Trump and his family, the President said, "I think that's a violation. Look, this is about Russia."

The President is absolutely correct. Mueller has come up to a red line in the Russia 2016 election-meddling investigation that he is dangerously close to crossing.

Of course, this disregards the fact that the president's past financial dealings may be relevant to his behavior and decision-making during the 2016 campaign. Say, in the as-yet-unproven scenario that he got tangled up with Russian money in the early 2000s. But it does indicate Whitaker has clear views on what the scope of Mueller's probe should be.

View full post on Youtube

August 2017: Whitaker promoted an article on Twitter calling Mueller's investigative team a "lynch mob," and urging the president's legal team not to cooperate with the special counsel's office.

September 2017: Whitaker was named Jeff Sessions's chief of staff at the Justice Department, where he was warmly received initially—until others became concerned about his intentions. CNN reports they might have had good reason:

Whitaker was not hired as Sessions' chief of staff by virtue of any pre-existing relationship with Sessions, but instead because White House officials believed Whitaker's loyalties would lie at the White House and not with the beleaguered attorney general, sources said.

This was backed up by a New York Times report:

View full post on X

October 2017: Whitaker, according to The New York Times, had been explicit about his plans before he made it into the Justice Department.

By October of last year, Mr. Whitaker was telling people that he was working as a political commentator on CNN in order to get the attention of Mr. Trump, said John Q. Barrett, a professor at St. John’s University School of Law who met Mr. Whitaker during a television appearance last June. His plan worked.

According to CNN, Sam Clovis—the Trump campaign national co-chair who was since named in a Mueller indictment and testified before the Mueller grand jury—was the one to encourage Whitaker to start making TV appearances to get Trump's attention.

September 2018: After a quiet year serving as the White House's "eyes and ears" in the Justice Department—a clear assault on the independence of the department from political considerations and an assault on the rule of law that John Kelly, often held up as the Adult in the Room in this White House, was fully on-board with—it looked like Whitaker was set for the big time. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who was overseeing the Russia probe after Jeff Sessions' recusal, appeared on the brink of resigning after a report emerged he'd said Trump was unfit for the presidency.

A New York Times report suggested Whitaker was set to be named his acting replacement.

Matthew G. Whitaker, the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, would become the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department, his White House counterpart, John F. Kelly, told him over the phone on Saturday morning, according to two people briefed on the call. To the White House, he was an obvious choice: a confident former college football player and United States attorney whom Mr. Kelly has privately described as the West Wing’s “eyes and ears” in a department the president has long considered at war with him.

Obviously, this would also have been insane. But Rosenstein decided to stay on, prompting the current next-level insanity less than two months later.

October 11, 2018: "I can tell you Matt Whitaker's a great guy," President Trump said in a Fox News interview. "I know Matt Whitaker."

November 7, 2018: A day after Democrats swept into control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, opening up the possibility Trump's dealings will be scrutinized even further, the president demanded Sessions' resignation as attorney general and installed Whitaker.

November 9, 2018: "I don't know Matt Whitaker," Trump said, suggesting he hired him because he had worked for Sessions. "He was always extremely highly thought of, and he still is. But I didn't know Matt Whitaker. He worked for Attorney General Sessions."

Trump has appointed an unscrupulous grifter to be Acting Attorney General of the United States, because that is exactly the kind of person he attracts. He does this because he thinks he can get away with it. His base, and the spineless Republicans in the Senate, will let him. Will the rest of us?

An earlier version of this article referred to Whitaker as a football "star." With 200 yards and two touchdowns in three seasons at Iowa, it appears he was an unspectacular player. We regret the error.

Jack Holmes

Senior Staff Writer

Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.