That’s how Trump described the people he’d hire to work for him in the White House and at the Cabinet agencies. We’ve all seen how that’s worked out, what with Scott Pruitt fired in disgrace from EPA, Tom Price ditto from HHS, Michael Flynn fired from NSA, Jeff Sessions from Justice, David Shulkin from the VA, and so on. Wikipedia has a good list here.
Suffice to say Trump’s description was a lie, one of thousands he’s told in not quite two years in office.
He may not quite have outdone himself with his latest appointment, but this one has to be in the top three. Acting Attorney General Matthew G. Whitaker is showing himself to be quite the grifter and con man, which is probably what appealed to Trump when the President hired him. In the two years before joining the Justice Department (as Sessions’ chief of staff), Whitaker
earned more than $900,000 from a conservative charity with no other employees and collected more than $1,800 in “legal fees” from a Miami-based invention-marketing company that was shut down amid accusations of fraud, according to a financial disclosure form made public Tuesday.
The form, which Whitaker first filled out after taking over as Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff, shows Whitaker drew a salary from the conservative Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust of $904,000 and collected $1,875 in legal fees from World Patent Marketing.
That company is notable because it shut down in May and agreed to pay a settlement of more than $25 million to resolve a Federal Trade Commission inquiry into its practices.
Even before those jobs his background was sketchy. He owned a day-care center, a concrete supply business and a trailer manufacturer. When he was appointed to the job as U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Iowa in 2004 (one wonders who recommended him to President George W. Bush and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft) he said his most consequential legal work was a personal-injury suit and a business dispute involving a dry cleaner.
It seems apparent this guy isn’t qualified to be the chief law enforcement officer for the United States of America except in one particular: he’s been a public critic of the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign of 2016. That was evidently enough for Trump.