Tag: Better Business Bureau

Rather than follow succession protocol and appoint Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as the Acting Attorney General, Trump bypassed Rosenstein to install a relative unknown, former Iowa U.S. Attorney Matthew Whitaker. Having spent 24 years at the Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor, I didn’t think Trump could reach any lower than Sessions, but it appears Whitaker was hiding in the false-bottom of the president’s barrel of applicants. Whitaker brought the FBI in and charged McCoy with using his elected office to extort money. McCoy recently said his two year fight against Whitaker’s charges ruined him financially and emotionally and he is convinced being a Democrat and an openly gay lawmaker is what motivated Whitaker’s decision to charge him. After Whitaker left the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he took a paid position on the advisory board of a Florida company that is now under FBI investigation and that the Federal Trade Commission says “bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars.” According to court documents obtained by the Miami New Times, when people tried to get their money back, Whitaker used his position as a former federal prosecutor to scare them off. Last year, he authored an article slamming Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as “going too far.” Whitaker did this without ever reviewing the evidence in Mueller’s possession. With his appointment as Acting Attorney General, Mr. Whitaker now will be in charge of the very investigation he trashed. Federal prosecutors have the power to begin or end an investigation against someone. They have the power to charge someone with a crime. For attorneys at the Department of Justice, every day brings opportunities to do the wrong thing.