Another one bites the dust
Republican political operative Rick Wilson, who hates Donald Trump every bit as much as the rest of us, famously said that everything Trump touches dies. We’ve seen it time and again: a lifetime of bankruptcies, his investors’ lives ruined, his numerous marriages ending disastrously. For the past two years Trump has been damaging America just by pretending to be the president. We’ve also seen Trump’s own people consistently circle the drain. Now here goes another one.
If you want to know how things tend to turn out for Donald Trump’s henchmen, just ask Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, or Michael Flynn. Oh wait, you can’t, because they’re all either behind bars or have agreed to go to prison. How about Trump’s doctors? Ronny Jackson and Harold Bornstein have both seen their reputations ruined and careers damaged simply by having Trump as a patient. This brings us to a guy named Matthew Whitaker.
Who is Matthew Whitaker? That’s the question most people were asking when Donald Trump tweeted last week that he was the new Acting Attorney General for the United States. But that answer has come quickly: he’s the kind of henchman Trump had to settle for after he couldn’t find anyone more suitable. Whitaker’s background consists of marketing fake time machines and scam toilets, and the kind of profoundly stupid things that make Trump’s other henchmen look like Einstein in comparison.
Last week we learned that Whitaker’s scam company had been shut down by the by the Federal Trade Commission last year. Last night we learned that Whitaker and his company are under active criminal investigation by the FBI. Would a toilet scam have been enough of a priority for the FBI that Whitaker would have ended up being charged and prosecuted? We don’t know.
But now that Trump has illegally inserted Whitaker into the DOJ and instructed him to use his position to commit obstruction of justice, thus making Whitaker’s downfall a matter of national security, the FBI more or less has to make the toilet scam investigation a priority. Matthew Whitaker is going down for this. Maybe he wouldn’t have if he’d remained out of Donald Trump’s orbit, but he will now. It’s the same story nearly every time Trump picks a new henchman to do his dirty work.
