By Ken Johnson

Matthew Whitaker is the acting U.S. attorney general. He is a criminal, equal parts boner-pill hawker and H. H. Holmes.

His antics are entertaining and stupid, but fundamentally Midwest horrible, like Chick-fil-A pumping legions of children to obesity.

He is the personification of the land of all-American shopping centers and lethargy that makes up the middle of this country, coalesced from the belly-fear of the corn fields teeming with lower-middle class debt…

Whitaker is the chief lawyer of the United States because the last one, Jeff Sessions, was fired by President Donald Trump following the midterm elections.

Trump firing someone isn’t surprising — his administration has a 58 percent turnover rate — but Trump is under investigation by the justice department, so firing the attorney general and replacing him with a steroid-soaked sock puppet is obstruction of justice. I’ll explain that later, but for now, just know that in future U.S. History III classes, this will be seen as one of Trump’s most notorious screw-ups.

Either that, or it will be know as the moment God Emperor Trump drained the swamp with quicklime.

Anyway, let’s look at Whitaker.

Whitaker’s past is drenched in fraud and idiocy, most of which surrounds one company: World Patent Marketing.

Theoretically, World Patent Marketing, like most patent companies, was supposed to help entrepreneurs by applying for patents and marketing their products.

That almost never happened. Instead, according to the Washington Post, their clients were encouraged to buy the complete market-and-patent package, and then World Patent Marketing would ghost their victims, keeping the money.

People were physically and legally threatened when they complained. Scott Cooper, the CEO, would threaten people with the martial art Krav Maga, which is probably the dorkiest way to try to intimidate someone.

“Many people ended up in debt or lost their life savings,” the Washington Post said in a recent article.

Now Whitaker is the attorney general, and the people he took advantage of have to live with that.

The Federal Trade Commission sued World Patent Marketing in 2017 for over $25 million and banned them from ever practicing in the industry again. Whitaker was on the board of World Patent Marketing and served as an adviser. He got involved in some extremely embarrassing projects before the company was shut down.

One project involved Bigfoot DNA, which they said could prove the existence of Bigfoot. Another involved a time-machine, which they said would be operational in about a decade.

The best one was a patent for an “extra-masculine” toilet for men with 12-inch penises.

Here is a small taste of that patent application:

“The average male genitalia is between 5 inches and 6 inches. However, this invention is designed for those of us who measure longer than that. I estimate that a 12-inch distance is adequate enough for most well-endowed men, though I would not be surprised if there are cases who need a greater distance.”

I hope the United States Patent and Trademark Office got the message — World Patent Marketing’s board is full of guys with massive shlongs.

In addition to the patent and marketing scam Whitaker ran, he was part of a laughably shady charity, ironically called the Foundation for Accountability and Civil Trust (FACT).

“FACT is a group of citizens who are committed to exposing unethical behavior, changing the culture of politics, and restoring faith in our public officials,” says FACT’s website.

FACT has launched high-profile lawsuits against prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. Now it looks like FACT has violated its tax-exempt status, which matters even beyond the ever-expanding boundaries of Whitaker’s scandals because prominent Republicans, such as the Koch Brothers, have been donating, and possibly funneling money through, FACT.

The Washington Post reported that Whitaker received $252,000 as a salary for being the president of FACT in 2015, “more than half the charity’s receipts for that year.”

There is not nearly enough space in this column to go over all of Whitaker’s transgressions. There are a ridiculous amount. He has done and said plenty of other unethical things, but here’s the takeaway: He is mean and dumb and corrupt.

And now Whitaker is in charge of the Russia investigation.

The firing of Sessions matters because he recused himself from the Russia investigation, which was the right thing to do as he had a Kremlin-sized conflict of interest.

Trump was angry that Sessions recued himself — Trump was counting on Sessions to severely constrict the whole investigation, so Trump fired Sessions and replaced him with Whitaker.

That, by the way, might as well be the definition of obstruction of justice.

On top of all that, Whitaker’s appointment is probably illegal because the Senate hasn’t approved him, making everything he does voidable.

Trump passed over Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is the obvious and legal choice for attorney general, and skipped all the way down to the biggest critic of the Mueller investigation in the Justice Department: Whitaker.

So why Whitaker? Why appoint someone whose past is arguably dirtier than Trump’s and employ him in an overtly illegal way?

Whitaker has been arguing against the Russia investigation since its genesis. That’s why.

In an interview on CNN, which happened right after Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate Trump’s blatant criminality, Whitaker gave a detailed explanation about how Trump could castrate the Russia investigation:

“I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced,” Whitaker said.  “And that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigations grinds to almost a halt.”

That is, again, exactly what is happening, and Trump might get away with it because Whitaker’s obstruction will happen largely out of view.

Firing Sessions has the same effect as firing Mueller — it’s obstruction of justice, slightly veiled.

Whitaker is a new low-water mark in the American descent back to madness.