President-elect Donald Trump may face serious confirmation battles for even some of his nominees who aren’t as high profile as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth.
For example, consider Matt Whitaker, Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to NATO.
When push comes to shove, Whitaker may be confirmed. Not, however, without controversy.
Whitaker is a former U.S. attorney, talking head, lobbyist, and advocacy group chief who served in Trump’s first term for three months as acting attorney general before joining an outfit that does campaign consulting and lobbying. He appears to have no experience in foreign affairs.
In his favor, Whitaker seems to have been effective as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, where he earned a reputation for aggressively prosecuting crimes related to methamphetamine and other drugs. Even in that job, though, he was slapped down by judges or juries in several high-profile cases.
Other parts of his record will receive strict scrutiny. Businesses he led faced controversies or lawsuits in Nevada, a concrete project, and Iowa, an affordable housing project. When he led a conservative advocacy group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, his large salary took up more than one-third or, in at least one year, more than half of its entire budget. And his past is peppered with ill-considered or even dangerously ignorant statements, such as that judges should not be “secular” and that states have a right to “nullify” federal laws. That last assertion, on which he elaborated at some length on more than one occasion, is entirely counter-constitutional, not to mention that hundreds of thousands of people died in the Civil War while fighting for that absurd proposition. Father of the Constitution James Madison called it “the spurious doctrine of nullification” and said it would be “a fatal inlet of anarchy.”
With all of that, though, the biggest hurdle Whitaker faces is the one that probably was most relevant in keeping him from being nominated to move from acting to Senate-confirmed attorney general six years ago. It’s nowhere near as headline-grabbing as sexual assault charges or allegations of sex trafficking, but it still could be problematic.
To wit: Whitaker had been an active participant in and video salesman for a company called World Patent Marketing, which promised to help inventors secure patent rights and make money off their work. Among the guffaw-generating “inventions” was an extra-large toilet for “well-endowed men” and a cryptocurrency that would supposedly enable time travel. But a federal court eventually ruled that World Patent Marketing was engaged in highly deceptive practices and ordered it to pay a settlement of $25 million and go out of business.
There was no direct evidence that Whitaker himself knew of the deceptive practices, although he should have done due diligence before becoming as involved as he was. The bigger problem is that he cited his background as a former U.S. attorney to bully people who complained about the company, threatening one of them with “serious civil and criminal consequences” merely for reporting World Patent Marketing to the Better Business Bureau. In the vernacular even if not in formal legal ethics, Whitaker’s threats against valid complainers were highly unethical.
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All of that, combined with his notable lack of the usual diplomatic background for a post as important as ambassador to NATO, will make Whitaker a tough sell to the Senate. It could be that much of this is smoke without fire, and maybe hearings will elucidate some heretofore hidden talents.
A president is due the benefit of some degree of doubts about his nominees. Still, Whitaker should expect no easy path to Senate confirmation, but instead a rather tough slog.