Matthew Whitaker, who replaced the now-fired Jeff Sessions as acting attorney general fewer than 24 hours after last week's midterm elections, is an uncompromising Trump loyalist and longtime Robert Mueller critic, installed in the position for the specific purpose of undermining the special counsel's investigation and, if necessary, bringing it to a swift, dramatic, and premature conclusion. His presence in the Department of Justice is now perhaps the single greatest threat to the rule of law in this country, other than the continued presence in the White House of his crimes-happy benefactor.

In a pitch-perfect Trumpian twist, it turns out that before ascending to his current role, Matthew Whitaker was also a cartoonish, grifting dope who shilled for a company that hawked time-travel cryptocurrencies, Bigfoot dolls, and toilets specially designed for men with big dicks—and that was shut down for good and paid a $26 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year for its alleged wrongdoing.

In 2014, according to Mother Jones, Whitaker became a board member of an outfit called World Patent Marketing, which cajoled investors into backing an array of patent-pending products that some might charitably describe as "questionable." And although board membership does not always indicate active involvement with a given enterprise, he was an enthusiastic supporter of WPM's three-o'clock-in-the-morning-infomercial-type garbage and happily invoked his status as a former U.S. attorney in order to defend business practices that some might charitably describe as "fraud." From Mother Jones:

[P]ublic records show he had substantial involvement with the company and its aggressive response to disgruntled customers and critics of its questionable practices. Whitaker joined the firm’s advisory board a month after it was attacked on a website called ripoffreport.com, which posts consumer complaints. In a report on the site, a writer claimed to have duped the firm into offering to help him get a patent for a fake idea: a fried chicken and waffle sandwich. “You cannot make a patent on a sandwich, yet they approved it,” the person wrote.

The WPM press release introducing the novelty bathroom fixture, dubbed the "MASCULINE TOILET"—all caps in original, of course—explains the problem the invention purports to solve in vivid, hilarious fashion: