On Wednesday, Donald Trump nominated former Attorney General Matt Whitaker to serve as the United States’ ambassador to NATO.
“Matt is a strong warrior and loyal Patriot who will ensure the United States’ interests are advanced and defended,” he said in a statement.
Whitaker, a staunch Trump supporter, previously served as the Department of Justice’s chief of staff before succeeding Jeff Sessions as attorney general in 2018. He was assigned to lead Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
According to The New York Times, Trump became interested in Whitaker after he stood out as a major critic of the Mueller investigation, insisting that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Trump specifically brought Whitaker in to act as an attack dog against Mueller, and one presidential adviser told the Times that Whitaker was sent there to minimize the investigation’s fallout. Whitaker eventually resigned from the Justice Department in 2019.
Whitaker had already proven himself to be an aggressive federal prosecutor in Iowa. He sparked outrage in 2007 when he brought a flimsy case against Matt McCoy, Iowa’s first openly gay legislator. Whitaker’s team allegedly gathered so little evidence for “attempted extortion” that the jury deliberated for only half an hour.
“Whitaker’s office clearly wanted to give the evangelical right within the Republican Party a trophy, and that trophy was me—one of the state’s most prominent young Democrats at the time,” McCoy told Politico in 2018.
Whitaker clearly had political ambitions, launching unsuccessful bids for the Iowa Supreme Court in 2011 and the United States Senate in 2014. He also served on the advisory board of World Patent Marketing, a shady company that sold toilets to “well-endowed men” among other things.
In 2018, the Federal Trade Commission ordered World Patent Marketing to cease operations and pay a settlement of more than $25 million after the company was found to be a scam.
Whitaker previously worked as executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civil Trust, or FACT, a conservative watchdog group that targeted Democratic leaders.
Whitaker currently co-chairs the Center of Law & Justice at the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank led by Linda McMahon, Trump’s unconventional nominee for secretary of education.
Trump has remained skeptical of NATO, threatening to leave the alliance if European defense spending did not increase. In February, Trump urged Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member that was “delinquent” on its payments.
That attitude, combined with the president-elect’s fondness for Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggests that Whitaker will likely act as an enforcer on behalf of a hostile Trump.
