President-elect Donald Trump selected Matthew Whitaker, his former acting attorney general for three months during his first term, as his ambassador to NATO on Wednesday.
But before he was elevated to either position, Whitaker was involved with a sketchy company that marketed bizarre inventions—including a “masculine toilet” with extra space for well-endowed men.
For about three years, Whitaker served on the advisory board for World Patent Marketing, a company promoting inventions that was investigated, fined, and eventually shut down by the Federal Trade Commission.
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Although the company billed itself as a marketing service for inventors to get their creations sold to the public, the FTC accused the company of taking money from inventors, not fulfilling their end of the bargain, and threatening them with “threats, intimidation, and gag clauses” when they complained.
One of these inventions was the so-called Masculine Toilet, which was announced with a press release in 2014.
World Patent Marketing eventually settled with the FTC in 2018, agreeing to pay almost $26 million in fines and shutting down business for good.
“After stringing consumers along for months or even years, the defendants did not deliver what they promised, and many people ended up in debt or lost their life savings with nothing to show for it,” the FTC said in a statement after they reached the settlement.
Documents eventually released by the FTC show Whitaker took a fairly active role in the company, even appearing in YouTube videos to market some of the company’s products and in scripts for television commercials. It’s unclear if these commercials were ever produced.
Whitaker was even the recipient of angry emails and messages from clients accusing the company of bilking them out of millions.
Before his involvement with the company, Whitaker was a federal prosecutor in his home state of Iowa during the Bush administration. He returned to government work in 2017, when he served as former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff before his resignation in November 2018.
House Democrats launched a probe into Whitaker’s involvement with World Patent Marketing shortly after he was named acting attorney general. But Whitaker only served in the position for roughly three months, until Bill Barr was confirmed in the role in February 2019.
