Donald Trump nominated former Attorney General Matt Whitaker to be the United States ambassador to NATO Wednesday.
“Matt is a strong warrior and loyal Patriot who will ensure the United States’ interests are advanced and defended,” Trump wrote in a statement.
A staunch Trump loyalist, Whitaker served as the Department of Justice’s chief of staff before replacing Jeff Sessions as attorney general in 2018. There, he found himself in charge of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Trump first took an interest in Whitaker after he distinguished himself as a major critic of the Mueller probe, insisting that there had been no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to The New York Times. Trump specifically brought Whitaker in to serve as an attack dog against Mueller, and one presidential adviser told the Times that Whitaker had been sent there to minimize the investigation’s fallout. Whitaker ultimately resigned from the Justice Department in 2019.
Whitaker had already proven himself to be one hell of an aggressor as a federal prosecutor in Iowa. He sparked backlash after he brought a flimsy case against Matt McCoy, the first openly gay member of the Iowa legislature, in 2007. The evidence Whitaker’s team drummed up for “attempted extortion” was so weak the jury reportedly deliberated for just half an hour.
“Whitaker’s office clearly wanted to give the evangelical right within the Republican Party a trophy, and that trophy was me—one of the state’s most prominent young Democrats at the time,” McCoy wrote in Politico in 2018.
Clearly holding political ambitions, Whitaker went on to launch unsuccessful bids for Iowa Supreme Court in 2011 and the U.S. Senate in 2014. He also held an advisory board position at World Patent Marketing, a shady company that sold toilets for “well-endowed men” among other random things. The Federal Trade Commission ordered World Patent Marketing in 2018 to shut down its operations and pay a settlement of more than $25 million, after the company was determined to be a scam.
Whitaker also previously served as executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civil Trust, or FACT, a conservative watchdog that targeted Democratic leaders. Whitaker currently serves as a co-chair for the Center of Law & Justice at the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank chaired by Linda McMahon, Trump’s unorthodox nominee for secretary of education.
Trump has remained skeptical about NATO and previously threatened to leave the alliance if European defense spending did not increase. In February, Trump encouraged Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that was “delinquent” in its payments. That kind of attitude, plus the president-elect’s affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin, means that Whitaker will likely act as an enforcer on behalf of a hostile Trump.