Just one day after the midterm elections, Trump took his revenge on embattled Attorney General Jeff Sessions. With his resignation in hand, at the president’s request, Trump moved quickly to appoint someone who would be decidedly more loyal. His pick? Session’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker. In his blind drive for a yes man, Trump seems to have stumbled on not only an unconstitutional pick but also a lawyer who might be better labeled a scammer.
Prior to his gig in the Trump administration, Whitaker was a member of the advisory board of World Patent Marketing, a Florida company that got the corporate equivalent of a death sentence from a federal judge for ripping off customers. In May 2018 Judge Darrin Gayles shut down the company, ordered it to pay a fine of about $26 million, and blocked defendants from future participation in any “invention promotion service” following a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission.
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World Patent Marketing promised eager inventors a one-stop solution to turning their bright ideas into bestsellers. With smooth-talking phone reps and glossy packages, sales reps with nice-sounding titles convinced clients to part with, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars supposedly paid for the company’s service of getting their ideas on the market.
For all of its talk, World Patent Marketing seems to have done little aside from taking inventors’ money. Ideas did not become products and clients did not get rich.
As the FTC complaint highlights, World Patent Marketing had little interest in making good on its promises. Patent applications weren’t even drafted by patent attorneys. Instead, the FTC argued, the company “bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars.” Once the money was in hand, the company turned from marketing to threats when faced with questions from clients who had spent significant parts of their savings on cheap talk.
In all of these fraudulent activities, Whitaker was not just complicit but an active participant. Although he was only listed as a member of the advisory board, his role seems to have been better defined as the company lawyer and jack-of-all-trades promo man. He is seen on videos advertising the company’s services and even reviewing inventors’ products like razor blades and hot tubs. His role was not marginal.
Worse, Whitaker capitalized on his previous role as a U.S. attorney to attract and keep money. He touted his credentials to give the company legitimacy and threatened disgruntled clients who wanted their money back.
A sales pitch script touted World Patent Marketing as having an “incredible advisory board” which included a “former United States attorney who was appointed by President George Bush.” In a news release, Whitaker also pushed his credentials to jack up the companies credibility and is quoted saying, “As a former U.S. attorney, I would only align myself with a first-class organization.”
But Whitaker was more than just a prop for advertising. The company also had no problem flashing Whitaker’s credentials to threaten frustrated clients.
In 2015 email to a company client, Whitaker wrote, “I am a former United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa and I also serve on World Patent Marketing’s Advisory Board. Your emails and message from today seem to be an apparent attempt at possible blackmail or extortion.” He added, “You also mentioned filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and to smear World Patent Marketing’s reputation online. I am assuming you understand that there could be serious civil and criminal consequences for you.” Other emails from the company to clients included similarly threatening language pushing Whitaker’s former title.
The FTC laid out what was going on in plain English, writing in the complaint against the company: “Defendants and their lawyers have threatened consumers with lawsuits and even criminal charges and imprisonment for making any kind of complaint.”
The court agreed and the judge’s order included that World Patent Marketing’s “officers, agents, and employees, and all other persons in active concert or participation with any of them, who receive actual notice of this Order… are permanently restrained and enjoined from suppressing the availability of truthful negative comments or review through any means including threats, intimidation, non-non-disparagement clauses, and suppression of online content.”
In short, Whitaker made the extraordinary jump from a thuggish company in trouble with the federal government for scamming people to becoming the acting attorney general.
He has no business being attorney general and should never have been at the Department of Justice in the first place. The United States has real issues for the attorney general to tackle, and the country cannot afford to be another unwitting victim of Matthew Whitaker.
