After he fired Jeff Sessions, Trump appointed a loyalist as Attorney General, in a move that many scholars and constitutional experts consider unconstitutional and illegal, per the Appointment Clause of the Constitution, which provides that a “principal officer” in the federal government may not be appointed without Senate confirmation,
But who is this Matt Whitaker? Whitaker, who has never been confirmed by the Senate for any position in the Trump administration, once said that judges should be Christian and proposed blocking non-religious people from judicial appointments. He went on to claim that judges needed a “biblical view of justice” and questioned the judgment of secular lawyers.
Whitaker made the remarks at a conservative forum in April 2014, where he appeared as a candidate for the Republican US Senate nomination in Iowa. Video clips of the event were saved by People For the American Way, a liberal campaign group.
As reported by the Daily Beast, Whitaker was also behind a secretive group that stepped in to protect members of the Trump campaign from allegations of meetings with Russian officials. That included trying to distract from the fact that Jeff Sessions lied about his meetings with the Russian ambassador in Senate testimony, by challenging Democratic senators to list all of their meetings. The organization was also connected to spreading rumors that Christine Blasey Ford mistook Brett Kavanaugh for another high school classmate.
When not busy interfering in the Russia investigation, Whitaker also kept busy promoting a patent scam. As reported by the Miami New Times, Whitaker wasn’t just on the board of a company selling would-be inventors worthless (and nonexistent) “worldwide patents,” he also sent threatening letters to a former customer of the scam who complained about being taken for tens of thousands of dollars. World Patent Marketing charged some customers over $70,000 for their patent services, did nothing, and used Whitaker to bully people into silence.
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