Sessions resigns as Attorney General

[fraurosena]

He said this on Faux!

His reasoning: 

“Under the law, the person running the Department of Justice must have been approved by the United States Senate for some previous position. Even on an interim post,” Napolitano said.

Napolitano continued saying that next in line for the position is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

“[Whitaker] was not confirmed by the United States Senate for a leadership position at the Justice Department. The White House will have to work this out. Who has been confirmed and who’s next in line? Deputy attorney general Rosenstein,” he said.

Even if you disagree with Napolitano and feel that as a recess appointment Whitaker can at least serve until the beginning of the new Congress in January, he would still have a problem under the Presidential Vacancies Act to serve up to 210 days because now former AG Sessions specifically stated that he didn’t resign, he was asked to resign which means he was fired and the PVA doesn’t apply.

[fraurosena]

According to lawyers Neal Katyal (acting solicitor general under Obama) and George Conway (yes Kellyanne's DH)...

Trump’s Appointment of the Acting Attorney General Is Unconstitutional

Quote

What now seems an eternity ago, the conservative law professor Steven Calabresi published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in May arguing that Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional. His article got a lot of attention, and it wasn’t long before President Trump picked up the argument, tweeting that “the Appointment of the Special Counsel is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL!”

Professor Calabresi’s article was based on the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, Article II, Section 2, Clause 2. Under that provision, so-called principal officers of the United States must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate under its “Advice and Consent” powers.

He argued that Mr. Mueller was a principal officer because he is exercising significant law enforcement authority and that since he has not been confirmed by the Senate, his appointment was unconstitutional. As one of us argued at the time, he was wrong. What makes an officer a principal officer is that he or she reports only to the president. No one else in government is that person’s boss. But Mr. Mueller reports to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. So, Mr. Mueller is what is known as an inferior officer, not a principal one, and his appointment without Senate approval was valid.

But Professor Calabresi and Mr. Trump were right about the core principle. A principal officer must be confirmed by the Senate. And that has a very significant consequence today.

It means that Mr. Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States after forcing the resignation of Jeff Sessions is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr. Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.

Much of the commentary about Mr. Whitaker’s appointment has focused on all sorts of technical points about the Vacancies Reform Act and Justice Department succession statutes. But the flaw in the appointment of Mr. Whitaker, who was Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff at the Justice Department, runs much deeper. It defies one of the explicit checks and balances set out in the Constitution, a provision designed to protect us all against the centralization of government power.

If you don’t believe us, then take it from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Mr. Trump once called his “favorite” sitting justice. Last year, the Supreme Court examined the question of whether the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board had been lawfully appointed to his job without Senate confirmation. The Supreme Court held the appointment invalid on a statutory ground.

Justice Thomas agreed with the judgment, but wrote separately to emphasize that even if the statute had allowed the appointment, the Constitution’s Appointments Clause would not have. The officer in question was a principal officer, he concluded. And the public interest protected by the Appointments Clause was a critical one: The Constitution’s drafters, Justice Thomas argued, “recognized the serious risk for abuse and corruption posed by permitting one person to fill every office in the government.” Which is why, he pointed out, the framers provided for advice and consent of the Senate.

What goes for a mere lawyer at the N.L.R.B. goes in spades for the attorney general of the United States, the head of the Justice Department and one of the most important people in the federal government. It is one thing to appoint an acting underling, like an acting solicitor general, a post one of us held. But those officials are always supervised by higher-ups; in the case of the solicitor general, by the attorney general and deputy attorney general, both confirmed by the Senate.

Mr. Whitaker has not been named to some junior post one or two levels below the Justice Department’s top job. He has now been vested with the law enforcement authority of the entire United States government, including the power to supervise Senate-confirmed officials like the deputy attorney general, the solicitor general and all United States attorneys.

We cannot tolerate such an evasion of the Constitution’s very explicit, textually precise design. Senate confirmation exists for a simple, and good, reason. Constitutionally, Matthew Whitaker is a nobody. His job as Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff did not require Senate confirmation. (Yes, he was confirmed as a federal prosecutor in Iowa, in 2004, but Mr. Trump can’t cut and paste that old, lapsed confirmation to today.) For the president to install Mr. Whitaker as our chief law enforcement officer is to betray the entire structure of our charter document.

In times of crisis, interim appointments need to be made. Cabinet officials die, and wars and other tragic events occur. It is very difficult to see how the current situation comports with those situations. And even if it did, there are officials readily at hand, including the deputy attorney general and the solicitor general, who were nominated by Mr. Trump and confirmed by the Senate. Either could step in as acting attorney general, both constitutionally and statutorily.

Because Mr. Whitaker has not undergone the process of Senate confirmation, there has been no mechanism for scrutinizing whether he has the character and ability to evenhandedly enforce the law in a position of such grave responsibility. The public is entitled to that assurance, especially since Mr. Whitaker’s only supervisor is Mr. Trump himself, and the president is hopelessly compromised by the Mueller investigation. That is why adherence to the requirements of the Appointments Clause is so important here, and always.

As we wrote last week, the Constitution is a bipartisan document, written for the ages to guard against wrongdoing by officials of any party. Mr. Whitaker’s installation makes a mockery of our Constitution and our founders’ ideals. As Justice Thomas’s opinion in the N.L.R.B. case reminds us, the Constitution’s framers “had lived under a form of government that permitted arbitrary governmental acts to go unchecked.” He added “they knew that liberty could be preserved only by ensuring that the powers of government would never be consolidated in one body.”

We must heed those words today.

 

[Howl]

We're close to the end of the Republican long con since the Special Counsel was appointed.  Find the critical people who would support Trump's position vis a vis the Mueller investigation (it's a witch hunt!) and get them in place.  Kavanaugh was the obvious first, and Whittaker the second.  Whittaker was  some obscure guy who was quickly elevated, because he said the right things on TV and radio way the hell back in the Spring of 2017.   These two people didn't pop up by happenstance.  

John Dean, interviewed by Jake Tapper,  says the Sessions request for resignation  was planned like a murder.  H.R. McMaster, CNN Security commentator and  previous National Security Adviser under Trump, was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer yesterday.  First, after listening to a radio interview of Whittaker back in March 2017, where Whittaker says that it's ridiculous to think the Russians had any influence on the election, McMaster says it strains credulity to think the Russians had no effect on the outcome of the election.  He also notes that one of his main concerns is that Whittaker will quickly find out what Mueller has on Trump & family and will take that directly to Trump and Trump's lawyers.  The WH has hired over a dozen lawyers to get ready for whatever comes from a Democratic House and probably to address whatever indictments may come from Mueller in the near term. 

My prediction/hope?  If Whittaker manages to totally quash Mueller's report, that someone, somehow, someway, will leak it the entire damn thing and be willing to go to prison over it in the name of getting the truth to the American public. Legal gears are grinding along; lawsuits will be filed over Whittaker's appointment and authority.  Mueller has likely planned for this contingency from Day 1.  Interesting times.  Off to Twitter now.  

[Howl]

So one more thing.  Lots and lotz of speculation on the Twitterverse that Whittaker might not last as long as Scaramucci! He has a few skeletons in his closet (faulty hot tub scam, anyone?) and if there is anything at all, it will be quickly dug up by the end of the day today.  Not to mention his relationship with Sam Clovis, who is thought to have some obscure Russian connections and I think may have sat for Mueller's grand jury. 

[Howl]

Holy Crap.  I mean HOLY CRAP!  The Des Moines Register reports on Whitaker's  response at a Family Leader (conservative Christian group) debate from when he was running for Senate in Iowa in 2014.  Whittaker believes in Biblical Law.  And you can bet that he would do whatever necessary to overturn gay marriage. If you thought it could get worse with this guy, it gets worse.  A lot worse.  Abysmally worse. Shout out to Rekha Basu, the opinion columnist for the Des Moines Register who wrote this excellent piece.  I'm putting the full text here because the web site has a bazillion annoying pop up ads. 

Matthew Whitaker's troubling opinion: Judges need a biblical view

Spoiler

 

Editor's note: This column was originally published on May 4, 2014.

"I'd like to see things like their world view, what informs them. Are they people of faith? Do they have a biblical view of justice?"  Matt Whitaker, during Iowa Family Leader debate

If elected to the U.S. Senate, former U.S. Attorney Matt Whitaker says he would only support federal judges who have a Biblical view, and specifically a New Testament view, of justice. "If they have a secular world view, then I'm going to be very concerned about how they judge," Whitaker said at an April 25, 2014, Family Leader debate.

Whitaker didn't return my call to his office, but as a lawyer, one might expect him to know that setting religious conditions for holding a public office would violate the Iowa and U.S. constitutions. He was effectively saying that if elected, he would see no place for a judge of Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic or other faith, or of no faith. Yet no one in the audience or on the podium seemed to have a problem with that, and his answer drew applause.

The debate venue had something to do with that. The event was sponsored by the Family Leader, the conservative Christian organization that engineered the ouster by voters in 2010 of three Iowa Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. The moderator, blogger Erick Erickson, asked questions designed to compel the four Republican candidates to prove their Christian credentials. And though U.S. senator is a secular office, they mostly obliged.  

Candidate Sam Clovis responded to Erickson's question about what criteria he would use to block President Obama's judicial nominees by saying he would vote for a judge who could link "natural law" to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Mark Jacobs said he would look for someone who would "not legislate from the bench." Joni Ernst echoed that view, adding the judge would need to understand that America's laws "all came from God."

But Whitaker went the farthest: "Natural law often times is used from the eye of the beholder and what I would like to see — I'd like to see things like their world view, what informs them. Are they people of faith? Do they have a biblical view of justice? — which I think is very important because we all know that our government ..."

"Levitical or New Testament?" interrupted Erickson.

"I'm a New Testament," continued Whitaker. "And what I know is as long as they have that world view, that they'll be a good judge. And if they have a secular world view, where this is all we have here on Earth, then I'm going to be very concerned about that judge."

Senators represent all the people of a state, and nation, not just those of the same religion. Yet there was no acknowledgment of religious pluralism, diversity or civil rights - on the bench or in the Iowa Republican Party.

Time and again, candidates realize they stand the best chance of winning a primary in today's Iowa Republican Party by picking a fight with the Constitution rather than honoring it. It's a kind of defiance that's growing around the country in the face of liberalized laws on gay marriage and increasingly fervent opposition to legal abortions.

"This is really important. It flies under the radar a lot of times, and it really does have an impact on people's lives," says Matt Menendez, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which does public interest litigation in defense of an independent judiciary. Menendez notes growing efforts in such states as Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas to attack judicial selection systems that were designed to insulate judges from political and other pressures. Told of Whitaker's position on judges, Menendez called it "flatly inconsistent" with the constitutional clauses that "unambiguously prohibit" any religious litmus test.

Erickson, the moderator, has taken the view that business owners who sell goods and services to gay people are "aiding and abetting" sin. He asked candidates about businesses' "right" to refuse service to some people.

Several responded with references to the Gortz Haus case in Grimes, where owners are suing the Iowa Civil Rights Commission for allegedly trying to force them to violate their religious beliefs by renting their venue for a same-sex wedding. Iowa not only acknowledges same-sex marriage but prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

"We don't want to discriminate against people," Ernst said. "However, if you have a person or a business that have those deep-seated beliefs then they should not be forced to do something that does not fit within their religious beliefs."

Whitaker called on the owners and other Christians to "stand firm."

Christians remain the overwhelming majority in America, accounting for 78 percent of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center. Sixteen percent of Americans are religiously unaffiliated. But numbers aren't the sue. The Constitution was written to protect the rights of everyone, including minorities. 

Now some people are seeking public office with the express goal of moving the United States closer to a theocracy, in which everything — including court rulings — is based on particular interpretations of the Bible. 

Even that holy book was a debate question, with the moderator noting that "everyone" in Republican debates talks about Jesus and the Bible without offering specifics. "What is your favorite book of the Bible?" Erickson wanted to know. 

It was a bizarre question, wholly inappropriate for a political debate, but all four answered it. No one asked why having a favorite Bible passage should be a prerequisite to winning a secular office. Or if the same question would be posed to a candidate of another religion. Or if a candidate of another religion could expect any consideration from the party's torch-bearers.

These issues weren't even debated with a wink and a nod, but rather, with a thumb on the nose of America's founding principles of equality and justice for all. The event should signal mainstream Republican presidential candidates not to even bother campaigning in this first presidential caucus state — because the deck is stacked against them here.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Matthew Whitaker is a crackpot"

Spoiler

The acting attorney general of the United States is a crackpot.

Matthew G. Whitaker, installed in the job by President Trump to replace Jeff Sessions, was asked in 2014, during an ill-fated run in the Republican senatorial primary in Iowa, about the worst decisions in the Supreme Court’s history. Whitaker’s answer, to an Iowa blog called Caffeinated Thoughts, was chilling.

“There are so many,” he replied. “I would start with the idea of Marbury v. Madison. That’s probably a good place to start and the way it’s looked at the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of constitutional issues. We’ll move forward from there. All New Deal cases that were expansive of the federal government. Those would be bad. Then all the way up to the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate.”

Reasonable people can differ over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Maybe there’s some space to debate the New Deal-era cases that cemented the authority of the regulatory state. But Marbury? This is lunacy. For any lawyer — certainly for one now at the helm of the Justice Department — to disagree with Marbury is like a physicist denouncing the laws of gravity.

Decided in 1803, at the dawn of the new republic, Marbury v. Madison is the foundational case of American constitutional law. It represents Chief Justice John Marshall’s declaration that the Supreme Court possesses the ultimate power to interpret the Constitution and determine the legitimacy of acts of Congress.

In Marshall’s famous words, “it is emphatically the duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” The untested new Constitution provided that the Supreme Court possessed the “judicial Power of the United States,” but it did not define what that power entailed.

“With one judgment . . . Marshall would chisel judicial review into the American system,” Cliff Sloan and David McKean explain in their book, “The Great Decision.” The ruling, “asserting clearly and unequivocally that the Supreme Court did indeed possess the power to strike down an Act of Congress as unconstitutional . . . laid the foundation for the American rule of law.”

This is not a controversial position, at least in mainstream legal thought. On occasion, Supreme Court nominees, including Antonin Scalia and Neil M. Gorsuch, declined to state their agreement with Marbury. But this coyness is not because they differ with the ruling; rather, it is because they fear stepping onto the slippery slope of assessing past cases.

More commonly, Marbury is the uncontested subject of lavish judicial praise. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. endorsed it during his confirmation hearings, and expanded on that view in a 2006 C-SPAN interview. Marshall’s decision meant “we have the courts to tell what [the Constitution] means and what’s binding on other branches,” Roberts said, “and that important insight into how the Constitution works has been, I think, the secret to its success.”

But if you think, as Whitaker seems to, that Roberts is too much of a squish (“he’s not a good person to point to when it comes to actually just calling balls and strikes in practice,” Whitaker said of Roberts in the 2014 interview), consider Roberts’s predecessor as chief justice, William H. Rehnquist. In his book on the Constitution, Rehnquist described Marbury as “the linchpin of our constitutional law.”

Or consider Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s comments during his confirmation hearings, describing Marbury as among the “four greatest moments in Supreme Court history.” Kavanaugh offered a more extended defense of Marbury in a 2014 Notre Dame Law Review article. “It’s my submission,” Kavanaugh wrote, “that Marbury v. Madison continues to mark the proper approach for constitutional interpretation.”

Yet we seem to have, as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, a man who begs to differ. Is this still his position? If so, how does that view — that the court in Marbury was too assertive in exercising its power — square with Whitaker’s simultaneous beef that the court was inadequately assertive in striking down laws during the later New Deal era and when dealing with the Affordable Care Act?

That’s not the only troubling question about Whitaker. During a 2014 Senate debate sponsored by a conservative Christian organization, he said that in helping confirm judges, “I’d like to see things like their worldview, what informs them. Are they people of faith? Do they have a biblical view of justice? — which I think is very important.”

At that point, the moderator interjected: “Levitical or New Testament?”

“New Testament,” Whitaker affirmed. “And what I know is as long as they have that worldview, that they’ll be a good judge. And if they have a secular worldview, then I’m going to be very concerned about how they judge.”

Marbury was wrong. Religious tests for judges. If you thought the big worry about Whitaker was how he would handle special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, that might be just the beginning.

 

[formergothardite]

2 hours ago, Howl said:

If Whittaker manages to totally quash Mueller's report, that someone, somehow, someway, will leak it the entire damn thing and be willing to go to prison over it in the name of getting the truth to the American public.

I really feel it might come down to this. Trump and the GOP are going to do anything and everything to keep all the info from coming out to the public. I don't doubt that there is stuff that Mueller dug up that even Fox news would struggle to spin in a positive light. 

[fraurosena]

I watched last night's Lawrence O'Donnel and Brian Williams on MSNBC. In one of those shows somebody said that even if Mueller were to be fired, the investigation stymied and the report somehow spirited away, the public could still find out everything what Mueller discovered. According to him, Mueller has lots of indictments lying ready, and as soon as he drops them in the courts, the legal system will have to pick them up. And then everything will become public knowledge anyway, in a perfectly legal and above board manner. 

I don't think it will come to that though. There are so many indications that Whitaker's appointment is unconstitutional, that he won't be there for long. As the DOJ budget has already been approved for the coming year, there is no way Whitaker can pull the financial plug for the investigation. The only real damage he could do is not approve new avenues of investigation. He could try to fire Mueller, but his reasoning would have to be pretty good (and it doesn't make the investigation go away; they'll need to appoint a new Special Counsel). And if he does fire Mueller, you can bet he will be impeached for it in January. And even if he doesn't, and even if he doesn't try to stymie the investigation, and even if he would act reasonably and correctly in every way, he still will be ousted in January, as his appointment is unconstitutional, and the Dems will most certainly hold the presidunce accountable the minute they have the power to do so.

Whatever happens, it's going to be a couple of pretty interesting weeks until then.

[fraurosena]

Good grief.

 

[fraurosena]

"That makes Whitaker a Mueller witness." 

Mind blown. 

 

[Howl]

 

Whew! From zero to "coffee guy" territory in less than 24 hours.  This is peak covfefe.  Counting the Scaramuccis 'til this guy is gone.  Maybe the new benchmark for whiplash turnrounds will be Whitakers. 

 

Quote

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.

I keep saying, Holy Crap! But HOLY CRAP!:  This indicates that Whitaker has zero, fucking ZERO, respect for the independence of the judiciary and DoJ.  I simply cannot believe that these words came out of Kelly's mouth in a way that could find its way into public discourse.   What was he thinking (or not thinking)?  Kelly has been in the bubble too long and is totally corrupt. 

AND, further confirms in my mind that Whitaker has already leaked Mueller information or will immediately leak Mueller information to the White House and their new cadre of lawyers. 

But Heh!   Trump is desperate to know what kind of kompromat Mueller has on him and his noxious spawn.  I had a little frisson of happiness typing "kompromat" and "Mueller" together in the same sentence. 

 

[formergothardite]

5 minutes ago, Howl said:

AND, further confirms in my mind that Whitaker has already leaked Mueller information or will immediately leak Mueller information to the White House and their new cadre of lawyers. 

I'm sure that was his first task. I hope that they gave the new coffee boy that Trump has totally never met before some fake info to see if it is leaked to Trump. 

[Howl]

1 minute ago, formergothardite said:

I'm sure that was his first task. I hope that they gave the new coffee boy that Trump has totally never met before some fake info to see if it is leaked to Trump. 

Indeed.  In the book The Red Sparrow, one technique used by Russian intelligence to find a mole or a traitor was to give a different story to each of numerous people.  Depending on which story came back, it was easy to identify who was giving away intelligence or leaking. 

[formergothardite]

Let fake info leak to Trump and he will act on it. He can't control himself at all. 

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm not sure if this has been shared: "Before he led the Justice Department, Matthew G. Whitaker promoted company accused of deceiving clients"

Spoiler

When federal investigators were digging into an invention-promotion company accused of fraud by customers, they sought information in 2017 from a prominent member of the company’s advisory board, according to two people familiar with the probe: Matthew G. Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney in Iowa.

It is unclear how Whitaker — who was appointed acting attorney general by President Trump on Wednesday — responded to a Federal Trade Commission subpoena to his law firm.

In the end, the FTC filed a complaint against Miami-based World Patent Marketing, accusing it of misleading investors and falsely promising that it would help them patent and profit from their inventions, according to court filings.

In May of this year, a federal court in Florida ordered the company to pay a settlement of more than $25 million and close up shop, records show. The company did not admit or deny wrongdoing.

Whitaker’s sudden elevation this week to replace fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions has put new scrutiny on his involvement with the shuttered company, whose advisory board he joined in 2014, shortly after making a failed run for U.S. Senate in Iowa.

At the time, he was also running a conservative watchdog group with ties to other powerful nonprofits on the right and was beginning to develop a career as a Trump-friendly cable television commentator.

World Patent Marketing — founded by Miami businessman Scott J. Cooper, who had donated $2,600 to Whitaker’s Senate campaign — prominently highlighted Whitaker’s résumé as a former U.S. attorney, which helped lend the company credibility.

But Whitaker seems to have been more than a figurehead. He spoke about inventions of the company’s clients in online videos — including a special hot-tub seat for people with mobility issues. He also penned a response to at least one complaint — writing a threatening email in which he cited his role as a former U.S. attorney, according to court filings.

“It’s really upsetting to know that guy will be attorney general,” said Ryan Masti, 26, who lost $77,000 after paying World Patent Marketing to help him bring to market his idea for a social media app to help the disabled. “It’s so offensive. It’s like a stab in the back.”

Whitaker did not respond to requests for comment about World Patent Marketing or the investigation. “We’ll decline,” Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said in an email to The Washington Post.

A partner at Whitaker’s former Iowa law firm declined to comment. A spokesman for the FTC also declined to comment.

There was no evidence that Whitaker knew company salespeople were making false promises to inventors, court receiver Jonathan Perlman said in an interview.

“I have no reason to believe that he knew of any of the wrongdoing,” Perlman said.

Whitaker was paid at least $10,000 by the company, according to court filings.

At the conclusion of the FTC investigation, Perlman sent a demand letter to Whitaker — along with other advisory board members — seeking repayment of the fees they received. Whitaker did not respond, Perlman said.

When Whitaker was appointed to the board of World Patent Marketing in October 2014, a company spokesman said in a press release that he would provide “vision and direction.” Later, the company touted Whitaker’s legal background and said he was working with the company to help investors avoid patent marketing fraud.

“As a former U.S. Attorney, I would only align myself with a first class organization,” Whitaker said in a 2014 company news release. “World Patent Marketing goes beyond making statements about doing business ‘ethically’ and translate those words into action.”

According to the FTC, however, the company falsely promised clients it would patent and market their ideas in exchange for hefty fees — and then pocketed the money.

“For the last three years, Defendants have operated an invention-promotion scam that has bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars,” the agency alleged in a recently unsealed court filing. “In truth and in fact, Defendants fail to fulfill almost every promise they make to consumers.”

Neither Cooper nor his current attorney responded to requests for comment.

In court documents, Cooper told the court that the company did provide some services and said the company’s website warned customers that most inventions are not commercially successful, according to the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Sun-Sentinel.

World Patent Marketing salespeople would persuade prospective clients to sign a confidentiality agreement and then ask them to explain their idea, according to court documents.

Whatever the concept, no matter how banal or improbable, investigators found, the salesperson would pronounce the idea fantastic and encourage the customer to pay for a package to market and patent the idea, documents show.

Many people ended up in debt or lost their life savings, according to the FTC.

Promotional material highlighted the meaty résumés of board members like Whitaker, which seemed to be a key component of the business operation. The company said the board would help review inventors’ ideas to maximize their ability to get rich.

“Innovators are today’s revolutionaries — forward-thinking visionaries that have come together to form the powerful and influential World Patent Marketing advisory board,” the narrator of one promotional video intoned, as photos of Whitaker and other board members filled the screen.

Masti, who said he struggled with ADHD as a child and hoped his invention would help others like him, said in an interview that he trusted the company in part because he was told that advisory board members, including Whitaker, had reviewed his idea and thought it would be successful.

“They said he’s very high up. He’s a professional. He’s got a lot of power,” said Masti, a resident of Cameron, N.Y., who said he voted for Trump in 2016. “That’s how they sold you.”

Now, Masti said he is living with his parents and facing crushing debt from loans he took out to pay the company.

Another former customer, Penn Mason, an airline employee from Nashville, said he paid World Patent Marketing $21,000 to help him patent and market a real estate app he had invented.

The company failed to patent his product and quickly stopped returning his phone calls, he said.

Mason said he believes that paid advisory board members like Whitaker essentially pocketed money from unsuspecting victims.

“That was our money,” said Mason, 52. Of Whitaker’s selection as acting attorney general, he said, “It makes me sick to my stomach . . . It’s like a punch in the gut.”

When investors began to complain that they had paid the company large sums with little to show for it, they were threatened, according to interviews and court documents.

Mason said that after he began to complain, he got a call from Cooper, the CEO, who threatened to sue him for slander. “He really scared me,” Mason said. “You feel like you’re dealing with all these bigwigs.”

The Miami New Times, which published in an in-depth investigation of the company last year, reported that Cooper would sometimes tell people who had posted negative reviews of the company that he had security with specialized training in the Israeli martial art Krav Maga.

In an August 2015 email included in court documents, Whitaker wrote to a complainant who threatened to go to the Better Business Bureau, “I am assuming you understand that there could be serious civil and criminal consequences for you.” He noted he was a former U.S. attorney.

Another board member, Aileen M. Marty, a professor of infectious disease at Florida International University in Miami, said she was told when she joined the board that she would be sent interesting patent ideas to review — but never received any.

Marty said she received one check for her board service, which she returned when she heard the company could be committing fraud.

“I wish I had never heard of the company and I wish that my name were not in any way associated with it. I can’t turn back time and not accept the offer to be on their board — believe me if I could, I would,” she said in an email to The Post.

As he was advising World Patent Marketing, Whitaker ran a conservative watchdog group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust. The group lodged numerous ethics complaints and calls for investigations, targeting Hillary Clinton and Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, as well as some Republicans.

On its website, FACT lists a downtown Washington address. But it is one of some 200 “virtual members” who use a K Street location to claim a presence in the nation’s capital, according to Brian Bullock, assistant general manager of Carr Workplaces, the firm that operates the site.

“They only come in every six months or so,” Bullock said. “We pretty much just accept their mail.”

FACT was formed in 2014 with a large donation from another tax-exempt charity that has served as a fountainhead of cash for organizations affiliated with the conservative movement — an arrangement that helps further mask the identity of donors.

The group received more than $1 million in recent years from a donor-advised fund called Donors Trust Inc., which is a source of funding for scores of other conservative groups, including Judicial Watch, Project Veritas, the Claremont Institute, the Federalist Society and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, tax filings show.

Whitaker received $402,000 in 2016 as FACT’s president and director — nearly a third of the donations the group received that year, according to its tax filings. He received $252,000 in 2015, more than half the charity’s receipts that year, tax filings show.

FACT officials declined to comment, but they described the group as a nonpartisan ethics watchdog that holds accountable government officials from both parties.

 

[Drala]

Whitaker is quite an interesting character, if even half of what Seth Abramson says is true.

 

[AmazonGrace]

What's the point of federal laws then?

[Howl]

This just keeps getting worse.  But, gotta hand it to Trump et al., he got all the bad stuff (states rights, Christian extremist, Bible thumper, Trump loyalist, anti LBGQ, spy, anti-Mueller and did I miss something?) in one person as the head of DoJ.  I'm absolutely certain that Depends are flying off the shelves because white evangelicals are wetting themselves with excitement over this guy. 

And more stuff keeps coming up.  

(CNN)When Iowa state Sen. Matt McCoy learned Donald Trump had appointed Matthew Whitaker to be acting attorney general of the United States, he was aghast -- he believes Whitaker was behind a politically motivated prosecution that was personally "devastating" to him.

It started in 2007, when McCoy was a rising Democrat in state politics, and the state's first openly gay lawmaker. Whitaker was the US attorney for Iowa's Southern District at the time.

Full text here: Whitaker's controversial prosecution of a gay Democrat 

This happened about 11 years ago, but it seems clear what was really going on and doesn't say a lot for FBI and the US Attorney's Office in Iowa.  

 

[fraurosena]

Even Republicans are speaking out against Whitaker...

 

[front hugs > duggs]

Serious question: if Republicans, or at least some of them, believe state rights can nullify federal laws, how can Trump sue sanctuary cities?

[Audrey2]

29 minutes ago, front hugs > duggs said:

Serious question: if Republicans, or at least some of them, believe state rights can nullify federal laws, how can Trump sue sanctuary cities?

 States rights are only for Conservative states that don't want to abide by Federal law which is what they deem too liberal. More liberal states aren't allowed to have states rights if they want to be more liberal than Federal law.

[fraurosena]

Let me get this straight. State law can nullify federal law. Ok. Fine. By that logic, state governors would trump the presidunce...

[Howl]

Found this excellent comment in response to an article on Talking Points Memo, on how Whitaker can damage Trump's written testimony to Mueller (due soon) as Whitaker provides Grand Jury and other information that he's getting now and feeds it to the WH.  As noted in the comment under the spoiler below, it could tailor any responses of anyone not yet called to the Grand Jury or inform the defense of those not yet indicted. Or could guide Trump in pre-emptive pardons.  It is truly a cluster-fuck. Whitaker could be in there for one or two Scaramuccis or even fractions of a Scaramucci and do immense damage.  Also, there's a link in this article to a piece by Marcy Wheeler at Empty Wheel that expands on the commenter's point: 

Spoiler

Remember Trump's testimony to the Mueller investigation that's happening in the form of a letter answering questions from Mueller that all parties agreed to about two months ago? (Remember all of the back and forth about including/not including obstruction questions which seemed to mostly be Giuliani misleading the press?) So, Trump is at some risk in answering those questions, especially without knowing what Mueller knows. Whitaker, apparently, has access now to what Mueller knows. Maybe not everything, but it seems fairly well established that he can (on national security grounds) ask for the grand jury proceedings and read them and no record will be kept. (Yes, the House might eventually ask Whitaker "Did you pass along the GJ proceeding to Trump?" but that's down the road a ways.) Knowing what Mueller knows, or at least what the grand jury knows should make it much easier for Trump to provide his testimony in a way that skirts (or at least is more likely to skirt) serious legal jeopardy. (Marcy Wheeler, of course, has written about access to the grand jury proceedings and what Whitaker might do to undermine Mueller at length. Her, she addresses Trump's testimony: TRUMP WON’T HAND IN HIS OPEN BOOK TEST UNTIL HE CHECKS HIS ANSWERS WITH MATT WHITAKER AND PUTIN

It seems to me that one of the most effective things Whitaker can do to undermine Mueller is find out what Mueller knows and then communicate that information to Trump and/or other people involved, including the Russians. Knowing what the grand jury has seen could inform Trump who to preemptively pardon, for example, and/or help shape current and future testimony from all of the players. Trump doesn't have to get Whitaker confirmed to get an enormous amount of value from his time at the DoJ. Trump doesn't have protect all of the people involved, or tear down all of the investigation to win, all he has to do is stay in power.

 

[fraurosena]

While all of those points are quite valid, there is one circumstance that isn't addressed. Whatever happens, depends entirely on what Mueller decides to actually do with the presiduncial answers. He could, for example, choose to keep them under wraps and not bring them to the GJ, because he finds them useless to his cause. And there's more besides that. Mueller's not an idiot. He also knows that Whitaker is a presiduncial mole at the DOJ. He can feed any information (or alternative information) to the presidunce that he wants, and laugh all the way to the courts with the answers the presidunce gives.

Alternatively, Mueller could simply bide his time until January. Slow down the pace of the investigation, push the pause button as it were. There will be no new revelations to brief Whitaker with, until January, and after the Dems have taken over.

Yes, Whitaker can do much damage. But the situation doesn't have to be as dire as some make it out to be.

[Howl]

Kellyanne Pennywise is back to damage-control Trumpsplaining, saying that yes, Trump DOES know Whitaker but it's not like they have known each other, like, forever, like lifelong BFFS or anything, don't know each other in the Biblical sense, like they've never prayed together or anything like that, but yeah, Matt Whitaker has dropped by the WH on occasion, so Trump knows him but doesn't KNOW know him. Got that?