The acting AG appears to have lied to agencies investigating him. Of course he does.

New documents released by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission suggest that acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker misled the agency’s investigators as he was stepping into his role last year as Justice Department chief of staff.

After several attempts to reach Whitaker about the Miami company where he was on the advisory board, the FTC investigator emailed his colleagues to relay that he finally reached Whitaker, who was willing to cooperate and asserted that he “never emailed or wrote to consumers” in his consulting role.

Oh yes? That’s not what we’ve read.

That statement to James Evans of the FTC appears to be inaccurate. Whitaker had written a letter in 2015 to a disgruntled customer who planned to report the company, World Patent Marketing, to the Better Business Bureau. In the letter, which was included in the FTC’s disclosure and reported previously by the news media, Whitaker threatened the customer, writing: “I am assuming you understand there could be serious civil and criminal consequences for you if that is in fact what you and your ‘group’ are doing.”

The company, you may recall, is basically another “take your money and do nothing for it” scam, like Trump “University.” The customer was disgruntled because he had paid the company a lot of bucks and the company had done bupkis to earn it. Whitaker’s role was to use his lawyer cred to threaten customers who objected to this way of proceeding. That’s just the right kind of person to be Attorney General of a whole large country.

The documents, produced Friday in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, contain internal correspondence among FTC investigators, who expressed frustration at being unable to reach Whitaker at several points during 2017.

At the time, the agency was investigating complaints about World Patent Marketing, which it described as an “invention promotion scheme” that it accused of “bilking millions of dollars from consumers.”

The emails also convey FTC investigators’ shock in October 2017 when — in the latter stages of their investigation — Whitaker was suddenly named chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Evans, who works for the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, wrote on Oct. 24, 2017. “Matt Whitaker is now chief of staff to the Attorney General. Of the United States.”

It is hard to believe, but all of this is hard to believe.