If the acting attorney general had been subject to the “advice and consent” of the Senate, hearings might have explored his apparent role as enforcer for a scam business before he was handed control of the federal law enforcement apparatus.
Note that Whitaker has claimed to be unaware of the company’s fraudulent practices, but is alleged on at least two occasions to have threatened people who had (accurately) called it a scam, and invoked his status as a former US attorney in doing so.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but it does not seem credible that someone could have an insider view of WPM & not realize the outfit was a sham. washingtonpost.com/politics/he-wa…
The FTC complaint against WPM is worth reading. The fraud here was, shall we say, not subtle. It beggars belief that an attorney could have been as involved with them as Whitaker was & not realize what was going on. ftc.gov/system/files/d…
Among other things, the FTC says: WPM claimed a Chinese manufacturing branch that did not exist. None of its customers ultimately made money. It falsely claimed its advisory board (on which Whitaker sat) reviewed client proposals.
Whitaker made legal threats against people who complained about these practices. It is simply not possible for him to have been unaware what kind of outfit he was cashing checks from.
If all he got from WPF was the $10k reported, incidentally, he sold himself rather cheaply. I would not be surprised if that eventually proves to be an incomplete accounting.
Final note: The FTC complaint detailing WPM’s fraudulent business model was filed in March 2017, six months before Whitaker took the job as Sessions’ chief of staff. His connection to the company was plastered all over their website. It was not a secret.
It should raise alarm bells that his participation in an egregiously fraudulent enterprise—one FTC had already exposed at the time of his hiring—was apparently no obstacle to being granted such a senior post at DOJ.
(Let alone acting AG, but I hope that goes without saying...)
Two obvious questions: (1) Were strings pulled to get him through background check? Because this seems like the sort of thing that would normally hold up a hire & security clearance, at the very least. (2) Is this an isolated case, or just the one we’re catching?
The second question is particularly disturbing because one of the very few checks on Trump has been that the middle-tiers of critical institutions like DOJ tend to be staffed by folks who have a quaint commitment to doing things legally. Which is a low bar, but it’s something.
If those middle tiers were quietly and gradually packed with an assortment of henchmen lacking any such scruples—people who might otherwise been filtered out in the vetting process—that would be... well, “worrying” is putting it too mildly.
Maybe Whitaker’s an outlier who slipped through the cracks. But we’re only learning all this now because of his elevation to acting AG. So maybe he’s not.
