Our View: Trump's New Acting AG Is Unfit To Serve

President Trump’s replacement of the U.S. attorney general on Nov. 7 has generated a storm of well-merited controversy regarding the constitutionality, ethics, politics and potential criminality of the appointment and appointee.

The Justice Integrity Project, found in 2010 as a non-partisan investigative reporting organization focused on such concerns, strongly opposes for these reasons the appointment of Trump’s pick Matthew Whitaker, shown left in a screenshot.

He won his job from Trump by being a cable television pundit who is avowed opponent of Special Counsel Robert Mueller III’s mission that he now supervises. On a related issue of even more historic importance, if possible, he opposes also the U.S. Supreme Court’s power to monitor unconstitutional and other excesses within the Executive and Congressional Branches.

Aside from such policy views, the circumstances of Whitaker’s appointment without confirmation by the U.S. senate and during a crucial phase of Mueller’s investigation raise serious constitutional and other concerns.

This is particularly so because of Whitaker’s involvement during recent years with lobbying for a dark money group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT).

More seriously, he was a director of World Patent Marketing (WPM), a scam company recently forced to pay a $26 million fine after an investigatio by the Federal Trade Commission, an agency located a block from the the Justice Department headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue and with overlapping jurisdiction in some cases of fraud and consumer protection.. The Wall Street Journal reported late Nov. 9 in its electronic edition FBI Is Investigating Florida Company Where Whitaker Was Advisory-Board Member. 

Whitaker, whose longtime involvement in partisan politics supercedes his work as a Bush-appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern district of Iowa, even served as campaign manager for Samuel Clovis, a witness in the Mueller inquiry.

Shown below are excerpts and hot links to a number of these and other news reports and commentaries on these issues.

As these revelations unfold, the Justice Department’s ethics office, congressional leaders and ordinary members of the public must speak out and demand that the Justice Department’s vital functions be run by a proper appointee vetted in a constitutional and otherwise appropriate manner.