President Trump has called Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker "a great guy," but the feeling apparently wasn't always mutual.
The Washington Post reviewed hundreds of interviews with Whitaker that were conducted before he was named as successor to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and found that during the 2016 election he called both Trump and Hillary Clinton "unlikable."
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The report points out that Whitaker's criticism continued up until shortly before he joined the Justice Department. In September 2017, he said that Trump's response to the violence in Charlottesville was "woefully inadequate" and that he needed to reject "white supremacists and alt-right groups."
With these past comments, Whitaker joins a long line of Trump officials who criticized him before joining his administration: White House counselor Kellyanne Conway once said Trump "built a lot of his business on the backs of the little guy," U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said he represented everything she "doesn't want in a president," and Energy Secretary Rick Perry said his "toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense" would destroy the Republican Party.
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