In Matthew Whitaker, Trump has a loyalist at the helm of the Justice Department
Matthew G. Whitaker, President Trump’s pick to temporarily helm the Justice Department, provides Trump with the leader he has long sought at the law enforcement agency: a political loyalist critical of the special counsel probe.
Before Whitaker joined the Trump administration as a political appointee, the Republican lawyer and legal commentator complained that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the election and of the Trump campaign was dangerously close to overreaching. He suggested ways it could be stopped or curtailed and urged his followers on Twitter to read a story that dubbed the investigators “Mueller’s lynch mob.”
Now — at least on an interim basis — Whitaker will assume authority over that investigation, an arrangement that has triggered calls by Democrats for him to recuse himself.
In a statement Wednesday, Whitaker said he was “committed to leading a fair Department with the highest ethical standards, that upholds the rule of law, and seeks justice for all Americans.”
Before joining the Justice Department in 2017 as Sessions’s chief of staff, Whitaker served as U.S. attorney in Iowa, made an unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid and ran a conservative watchdog group. For a time, he served on the advisory board of an invention-promotion company that was shut down earlier this year amid a Federal Trade Commission investigation, records show.
Fellow conservatives cast Whitaker’s political background as an asset. “There’s so many things that fall within the Justice Department’s responsibility that lie at the intersection of law and politics that you really need to be knowledgeable and able to see the issue in both political and legal terms,” said former deputy attorney general George J. Terwilliger III.
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