How Matthew Whitaker's 'wingnut welfare' stint made him perfect for Trump
By Paul Waldman
Opinion writer
November 21 at 12:18 PM
Acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker, in addition to being the man President Trump picked to put a stop to the investigation of the 2016 Russia scandal, is an entrepreneurial fellow. We’ve already learned about his involvement with a scam patent marketing company that was shut down by the feds after cheating customers out of $26 million.
And new information on Whitaker’s recent employment sheds light on an interesting corner of the political world, one where a guy like Whitaker can earn huge sums of money for doing very little — and in the process, it turns out, audition to become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. You might even call it swampy.
Or you might call it “wingnut welfare,” a disparaging term that refers to a system wherein conservatives are granted well-remunerated sinecures from which they can advocate conservative ideas in the media while barely having to work. Is there a bit of jealousy in that term, used as it is by liberals who perhaps wish that more of their own donors would toss money around as freely as conservative donors do? Absolutely. But Whitaker was employed by a particularly strange kind of Potemkin organization, created to give the appearance of legitimacy while having little real existence outside of a cable-news chyron underneath Whitaker’s name. And oh boy was it lucrative, as The Post reports:
In the three years after he arrived in Washington in 2014, Matthew G. Whitaker received more than $1.2 million as the leader of a charity that reported having no other employees, some of the best pay of his career.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/11/21/how-matthew-whitakers-wingnut-welfare-stint-made-him-perfect-for-trump/
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