(Nov. 21) President-elect Donald Trump may face serious confirmation battles for even some of his nominees who aren’t as high profile as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth.
For example, consider Matt Whitaker, Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to NATO.
When push comes to shove, Whitaker may be confirmed. Not, however, without controversy.
Whitaker is a former U.S. attorney, talking head, lobbyist, and advocacy group chief who served in Trump’s first term for three months as acting attorney general before joining an outfit that does campaign consulting and lobbying. He appears to have no experience in foreign affairs.
In his favor, Whitaker seems to have been effective as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, where he earned a reputation for aggressively prosecuting crimes related to methamphetamine and other drugs. Even in that job, though, he was slapped down by judges or juries in several high-profile cases.
Other parts of his record will receive strict scrutiny. Businesses he led faced controversies or lawsuits in Nevada, a concrete project, and Iowa, an affordable housing project. When he led a conservative advocacy group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, his large salary took up more than one-third or, in at least one year, more than half of its entire budget. And his past is peppered with ill-considered or even dangerously ignorant statements, such as that judges should not be “secular” and that states have a right to “nullify” federal laws. That last assertion, on which he elaborated at some length on more than one occasion, is entirely counter-constitutional, not to mention that hundreds of thousands of people died in the Civil War while fighting for that absurd proposition. Father of the Constitution James Madison called it “the spurious doctrine of nullification” and said it would be “a fatal inlet of anarchy.”
With all of that, though, the biggest hurdle Whitaker faces is the one that probably was most relevant in keeping him from being nominated to move from acting to Senate-confirmed attorney general six years ago. It’s nowhere near as headline-grabbing as sexual assault charges or allegations of sex trafficking, but it still could be problematic…. [The rest of this column, including the “problematic” part of Whitaker’s record, is at this link.]
