There’s a reason the caravan is coming. This is a Grade A great country. The best of the best. Ask Matthew G. Whitaker.
Talk about your dreamers dreaming the American dream. Just a few years ago Whitaker was pitching safe razor blades – helping folks like you and your Uncle Ernie, actually pretty much all of us who wake up in the morning with a fool proof idea, a new thing, an exciting gizmo, something that will revolutionize the way the world works. I’m a dreamer too. For me, it was the world’s best vending machine. I could see them in subway stations and by bus stops anywhere and everywhere: eight quarters gets you a cup of steaming hot pasta e fagioli. Coughing. Sneezing. Feel like the flu’s got your name. Or maybe you just don’t want to go to work? Two bucks gets you the very best healthy pick-up: Mama Marie’s Fantastic Italian Homemade Pasta e Fagioli.
Your idea might have been better than mine but we both know there are millions of us amateur inventors out there. We can’t help it if the great ideas keep coming. But none of us know what to do with them. No way I was going to build a vending machine, stock it with soup, then sneak it onto the Times Square subway station platform all by myself. I’m strong but not that strong.
Which is where World Patent Marketing came in. Promising inventors like you and me and Uncle Ernie they’d help. This is what their snazzy website said: “World Patent Marketing is a leading manufacturer and engineer of patented products. We are an innovation incubator, helping entrepreneurs develop new ideas.” Exactly what we need, don’t you think? An innovation incubator. Which is where the brand new acting attorney general of these United States came in. In a press release announcing that Mr. Whitaker had joined the board, he said he was honored to be a part of World Patent Marketing because it was a “trusted partner to many inventors.” And that “as a former U.S. attorney, I would only align myself with a first-class organization.”
He had an important job which is why he was paid $10,000. Matthew Whitaker did invention evaluation for World Patent Marketing. I had a chance to see his inspiring 26 second pitch for the safety-first razor blade protective cover: “It’s a simple design,” Matthew said, “but a unique design that I think it’s not only going to protect people from typical injuries you get from using a straight razor blade but also be easily accessed in places you don’t usually find razor blades like kitchens and households because it easily folds into itself and protects anybody from getting cut by the way.”
Did you see the World Patent Marketing video on Vimeo? There’s the inspiring moonwalk then this beautiful girl tells us, because you know she knows “that just like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin you have dreams. And World Patent Marketing is here to help you to turn your dreams into reality. Let’s take a closer look at what World Patent Marketing can do for you: World Patent Marketing is the world’s leading patent and inventor services company. And an A rated member of the Better Business Bureau. Our ultimate objective is to prepare your product idea for a licensing deal with a major manufacturer.” Absolutely fantastic. Exactly what I’d need to take Mama Marie’s Fantastic Italian Homemade Pasta e Fagioli nationwide. Or what you might need for your exciting combination cordless toothbrush/mp3 player.
Who knew that the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint in Florida claiming World Patent Marketing “bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars.” They said inventors like you and me were told they had to spend about $3,000 for an introductory “Global Invention Royalty Analysis.” That’s probably what Matthew Whitaker did in his 26-second video. Then clients were offered various packages that cost anywhere from $8,000 to $65,000. According to the New York Times, the government says thousands of would-be inventors — “whose ideas included posterior-enhancing jeans, bimini tops for lawnmowers and fruit crossbred with marijuana — were ripped off in the scheme. They lost as much as $400,000 apiece; some spent their entire life savings.” You have to hand it to the guy or gal who came up with pot-filled plums.
What about Matthew Whitaker? According to the Times, court documents “show that when frustrated consumers tried to get their money back, Scott J. Cooper, the company’s president and founder, used Mr. Whitaker to threaten them as a former federal prosecutor.”
Anyway, it seems that this May, World Patent Marketing decided to settle with the FTC and pay back $25,987,192. Unfortunately, customers like you and me and Uncle Ernie were stiffed.
Yes, you heard it here. The acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, served on the advisory board of a Florida company that a federal judge shut down last year and fined nearly $26 million for scamming customers. But that hasn’t stopped Matt Whitaker. And that’s got to be an inspiration to everyone who might have unsuspectingly helped to scam the unsuspecting. How many ethically-challenged Americans wouldn’t love the chance to become the chief law enforcement officer in the most powerful country in the world?
Now, it hasn’t always been so easy for Whitaker. He’s had to work for everything he’s gotten. From the state of Iowa, Whitaker played tight end for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes and earned his undergraduate degree in communications, where I assume he picked up the necessary skills to pitch the razor blade protector. Then Whitaker scored an MBA and graduated from its law school. No pretentious Harvard or Yale for Whitaker.
In 2002, Whitaker began a career in politics, but lost his bid to be Iowa state treasurer. Probably because he loves the law and loves justice even more, and because he is a very enthusiastic Republican, Whitaker was appointed by President Bush and served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa from 2004 to 2009. The Associated Press highlighted his 2007 prosecution of Matt McCoy “a rising star in the Democratic Party” and “Iowa’s first openly gay senator.” According to the AP, Republican Whitaker had a grand jury charge McCoy “with attempted extortion by an elected official, an offense that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. He alleged that McCoy demanded and accepted $2,000 in payments from a businessman seeking to obtain a waiver to sell home security products for the elderly to Iowa’s Medicaid program, threatening to block state business if he wasn’t paid.”
But, the AP noted that McCoy’s attorneys argued that in fact the FBI had paid “Thomas Vasquez, a salesman with a history of financial, domestic and substance abuse problems” and that he “agreed to be a paid informant, recording several conversations with McCoy and making what prosecutors called ‘bribe payments’ to McCoy with money supplied by the FBI.
McCoy’s lawyers argued that Vasquez had used the government’s money to buy drugs. They argued that Whitaker’s indictment “was based on out-of-context snippets of 12 hours of recorded conversations, and that [McCoy’s] actions had an innocent explanation that his legal team shared with Whitaker early on.”
According to the AP: “After a nine-day trial, jurors returned their acquittal within two hours …One of his former attorneys, Marc Beltrame, recalled that some jurors felt so bad for McCoy’s ordeal that they privately apologized afterward. The case struck Iowa Democrats and some media observers as an abuse of power.
“Why would the federal government contact, wire and pay an informant without checking him out — or, worse, despite knowing he was disreputable? It has all the earmarks of a politically motivated witch hunt,’ Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu wrote after the acquittal.”
You can’t win them all. Whitaker returned to politics, heading up Tim Pawlenty’s losing presidential bid in Iowa, then working as the state co-chairman of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s unsuccessful 2012 White House bid. Whitaker is fond of the very popular Iowa saying: “If you don’t succeed at first, fail, fail, fail again until President Trump takes notice.”
I’m not crazy about talking about anybody else’s relationship with God because it’s pretty darn complicated. Especially in today’s world where God works in mysterious ways, where evangelicals embrace serial abusers and adulterers. But thankfully, Matthew Whitaker, a once-upon-a-time keynote speaker for the Christian Coalition, found a way to threaten dissatisfied inventors who wanted World Patent Marketing to return their money and managed at the very same time to love Jesus with all his heart. Never losing his faith, he naturally wants everyone else to love Jesus as much as he does. Especially federal judges. While running in 2014 to be a senator for Iowa, Matthew bravely proclaimed that he would demand that federal judicial nominees be “people of faith” and “have a biblical view of justice … As long as they have that worldview, then they’ll be a good judge,” he said. “And if they have a secular worldview, where this is all we have here on earth, then I’m going to be very concerned about how they judge.” Rightfully so, considering the Jews and all the Muslims, not to mention the atheists who don’t know Jesus.
Sadly, Matthew lost that race, too.
But, thank God, he’s now our acting attorney general.
No wonder the caravan is coming. Any Honduran with FOX News and Jesus in his heart knows this is the land of opportunity. This is Whitaker World.
