Here are some things to know about Matthew Whitaker, the current acting attorney general. According to remarks he gave at a forum in 2014, Whitaker thinks judges should be guided by the New Testament. That same year, he was a paid advisor to World Patent Marketing, a company that was shut down by a federal judge and fined almost $26 million for allegedly running an invention-promotion scam. In 2007, as U.S. Attorney, Whitaker was accused of a politically motivated—and ultimately unsuccessful—prosecution on extortion charges of Matt McCoy, Iowa’s first openly gay senator.

But that was then. Most importantly to our purposes now, the new AG has frequently disparaged the Mueller investigation. As The Editorial Board of The New York Times put it on Thursday: “Mr. Whitaker—who has been called the ‘eyes and ears’ of the White House inside the Justice Department by John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff—has expressed a Trumpian degree of hostility to the investigation he is now charged with overseeing. He has called it a ‘witch hunt’ and, in its earliest months, wrote an opinion piece arguing that Mr. Mueller was coming ‘dangerously close’ to crossing a ‘red line’ by investigating the president’s finances.”

Well there are red lines, but then again there are also blue waves. Barely had we recovered from election-returns watching, when news broke that the president had pressured Jeff Sessions into resigning and appointed this guy Whitaker in his place. His meteoric ascension was met by 900 street demonstrations across the country, organized under the rubric, “Nobody Is Above the Law—Mueller Protection Rapid Response.” By Friday morning, Trump was on the White House lawn saying he didn’t really know Whitaker at all. Other sources beg to differ: On Vox, Murray Waas reported, “Whitaker’s open sympathizing with Trump’s frequent complaints about the Mueller investigation resulted in an unusually close relationship between a president and a staffer of his level. The president met with Whitaker in the White House, often in the Oval Office, at least 10 times, a former senior administration official told me.”

Asked directly by CNN’s Abby Phillip whether he believed his new appointee would “rein in” Mueller, the president became apoplectic. “What a stupid question. What a stupid question that is,” he fulminated. This was of a piece with his continual demeaning of African-American women journalists—this week, he also called April Ryan “a loser” and characterized a question from Yamiche Alcindor about nationalism as “racist.”