Finance

Let’s Take A Closer Look At Purported Attorney General Matthew Whitaker’s Super Sketchy Finances

No Trump Administration official’s financial snapshot would be complete without some campaign finance violations.

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Don’t even try to convince me that Matthew Whitaker is not in fact DEA Agent Hank Schrader from Breaking Bad — the resemblance is uncanny (spoiler alert ahead, if you’re half a decade behind on your neo-western crime dramas). Clearly Hank actually escaped that clash with neo-Nazis in the desert, and has gone into deep cover as their acting attorney general.

So it totally makes sense that Whitaker has revised his financial disclosure forms five times in November alone (this one too) and has a bunch of vague payments from shady organizations on there. Wake up, people! If Hank is going to blend into his undercover role as Acting Attorney General Matthew George Whitaker, a use trademark for Schraderbräu is not going to cut it. He has to conjure up the type of assets that are more like what would be expected of any red-blooded political appointee of the Trump Administration.

Shadowy millions from a right-wing faux charity? Check. Whitaker’s financial disclosure forms show that he received $904,000 in income from something called the Foundation for Accountability & Civic Trust from 2016 through approximately the end of 2017 alone. I guess this organization styles itself as “FACT,” because cute acronyms. Anyway, Whitaker was the president and executive director of FACT, a role he chiefly leveraged not just to enrich himself, but also to question the ethical integrity of Hillary Clinton. For performing this noble duty, he received an annual salary ranging from $63,000 in 2014 up to $502,000 in 2017, according to an Associated Press review of tax filings and public financial disclosure forms. In 2015, almost half of what FACT brought in went to Whitaker’s $252,000 salary that year (he was FACT’s only fulltime employee in 2015 and 2016, which makes me wonder what exactly he was presiding over and directing as its president and executive director… it was just one guy). And while we do know that FACT, as a tax-exempt organization, didn’t pay any taxes on its revenues, we don’t know where the bulk of that revenue actually came from. FACT itself mostly obtained its income from Donor’s Trust, another nonprofit set up to allow conservative and libertarian donors to maintain their anonymity… in funneling donations to a nonprofit “dedicated to promoting accountability, ethics, and transparency,” according to FACT’s own vision statement. Immunity to irony is one of the basic qualifications for being a Trump Administration official, so everything checks out so far.

But what about just basic hucksterism? You betcha! This is the part you’ve probably already heard about, although the amount he received from World Patent Marketing is small potatoes compared to some of Whitaker’s other slimy dealings (the company paid Whitaker at least $9,375 between October 2014 and late February 2016, and owed him another $7,500 for services supposedly rendered between May 2016 and February 2017). Matthew Whitaker served on World Patent Marketing’s advisory board. What did World Patent Marketing do? Scammed aspiring inventors by, for a hefty fee, making promises they didn’t keep and screwing up any chance hopeful inventors might have had at actually securing a real patent. The Federal Trade Commission has since shuttered World Patent Marketing, seized its assets, and tasked a court-appointed receiver with hunting down nearly $26 million that is unaccounted for.

Of course, no Trump Administration official’s financial snapshot would be complete without some campaign finance violations. The Hatch Act prohibits current federal employees from accepting political donations. Specifically, the text of the statute says that a federal employee of an executive agency may not “knowingly solicit, accept, or receive a political contribution from any person,” with a narrow exception that wouldn’t be applicable here. 5 U.S.C. § 7323(a); see also 5 U.S.C. § 7322 (definitions). The Hatch Act’s implementing regulations also state that a federal employee may not “solicit, accept or receive a political contribution from another person.” 5 C.F.R. § 734.303. Don’t worry, the Federal Circuit has already found that the Hatch Act as amended in 1993 passes constitutional muster. See McEntee v. Merit Sys. Prot. Bd., 404 F.3d 1320, 1332 (Fed. Cir. 2005). Despite all this, in January and February of this year, when Whitaker was chief of staff at the Justice Department (definitely a federal employee), four people described as “active Republicans” donated a combined $8,800 to the committee for Whitaker’s failed 2014 campaign for an Iowa Senate seat. Whoops. One of them, reached for comment by CNN and asked why he had donated $1,000 in January 2018 to Whitaker’s 2014 Senate campaign, had this perfectly reasonable explanation:

I don’t think I have to disclose that.

The Office of Special Counsel (which can investigate Hatch Act complaints and is not connected to the other special counsel’s office you know and love featuring human chunk of granite Robert Mueller) has opened a case file on the matter.

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Finally, there’s Whitaker’s characteristic indifference to wisely planning for the future. Yes, a guy who made $502,000 in one year from just one of his several income schemes streams has only one real retirement account according to his financial disclosure forms: an IRA valued at between $1,001 and $15,000. His spouse is doing a bit better, but still, that is pretty pathetic. Remember when Republicans were supposedly the party of personal responsibility? And I thought Kavanaugh was a crappy retirement planner….

All I can say is that if Matthew Whitaker really is undercover DEA Agent Hank Schrader trying to mimic the finances you would expect from a Trump appointee, he is doing a fantastic job. He’s got the dark money filtered through a fake charity, he’s getting his beak wet on the basic scams, he seems to be ignoring pretty standard campaign finance laws, and he’s even nihilistically burning through hundreds of thousands of dollars without any apparent thought of a future retirement. There are plenty of reasons to be against Matthew Whitaker as Acting Attorney General, including his appointment probably being illegal and his sad fixation on his college football career. I guess if you need another one, it’s that maybe the nation’s top law enforcement official shouldn’t have the personal finances of a two-dimensional corrupt politician stock character.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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