Whitaker may be a bad choice but he's a legal one

Article written by Stephen I. Vladeck, professor at the University of Texas, published in NYT.

I'm tempted. NYT says Whitaker may be a bad choice means Whitaker is an excellent choice.

The article is prejudicial, written negatively about Whitaker without anything substantiating and with ambivalent wording.

* Trump's selection of Whitaker as attorney general provoked alarm across the political spectrum, and for good reason. But no reasons are given.

* Troubling as Whitaker may turn out to be for the rule of law ... Again no reasoning given.

* He appears to be stunningly unqualified and have radial troubling views about the role of the federal courts.

* He takes over supervision of Mueller even though he has been unabashedly highly partisan critic of Mueller's investigation and almost certainly has an insurmountable professional conflict of interest that ought to force him to recuse himself.

[Written as if Mueller and his entire team aren't unabashedly highly partisan with conflicted interests]

* Perhaps these are the concerns that animate Whitakers detractors

* Lawyer's concerns are that Whitaker is not confirmed by the Senate.

Then Vladeck gets into why the appointment is constitutional and the legal cases that precede it.

Concluding:

But to avoid Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s warning that “hard cases make bad law,” we shouldn’t let bad policy as applied to bad choices encourage us to make bad constitutional law.

Fine. Whatever. Absent from Vladeck's legal analysis is all of the FBI and DOJ corruption made apparent by the FISA warrants allowing spying on Trump as candidate and the present Investigation into Russian collusion that after two years has found no such thing anywhere close to it, and that keeps Trump from having the FBI and DOG challenged and all their malfeasance brought to light and the principals brought to justice.

No mention of this appointment as a single step in draining the swamp of corrupted officials and that's the real reason for "alarm across the political spectrum."  Vladeck's discussion of the legal niceties is precious but gives NYT readers no real information at all.

Since Vladeck doesn't mention why Whitaker appears to be stunningly unqualified to serve as nations chief law enforcement officer, let's take a quick look elsewhere.

Wikipedia looks to be written recently specifically to answer the question why Whitaker is unqualified. Ha ha ha ha ha. Man, oh man, these crackpots are good. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in Soviet era Russia surrounded by Party loyalists hell-bent on controlling all communication, all sources and flows of information.

I'm looking for items that cause alarm for lawyers and politicians.  I expect Wikipedia to deliver. And it does.

Born 1969. Goodness, a youngster.

* Whitaker worked for World Patent Marketing, a firm that was fined $26 million and shut down by regulators in 2017 for deceiving consumers.

Well, that's pretty bad. And recent.

* Whitaker was responsible for the unsuccessful investigation and prosecution of Iowa state Sen. Matt McCoy, a liberal Democrat, on charges of attempting to extort $2000, based on the word of a man former associates depicted as a drug user, a deadbeat and abuser of women, a man so shady even his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsors called him "a pathological liar." The jury too less than two hours to find him "not guilty."

* Ran a 1-man operation, Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a non-profit specializing in legal and ethical issues related to politics and supported by conservative donors. The organization had a special focus on the Hillary Clinton e-mail controversy and favoritism in the business dealings of Clinton. During this time Whitaker appeared regularly on conservative talk-radio shows and cable news and wrote opinion pieces that appeared in USA Today and Washington Examiner.

* Whitaker was a CNN contributor. Hoping his media appearances would catch the eye of Trump administration, writing opinion column for CNN titled "Mueller's Investigation of Trump is Going Too Far." Stating that Mueller's investigation was a "lynch mob," that it should be limited, and that it should not probe into Trump's finances.

That worked.

The rest of the article gets into Whitakers legal and policy views, Constitutional issues, criticisms of Special Counsel Investigation, relationship with Donald Trump, [Trump denies knowing Whitaker], other policy issues, role as chief of staff, acting attorney general, and reaction to his appointment.

Altogether thorough. Altogether negative. Nothing supportive. Assumption that Trump is evil and dangerous. Tell me this isn't Soviet era Russia.

We'll see how far Whitaker gets in creating more trouble for FBI and DOJ through sunlight. His position is temporary, after all.

Until it isn't.