The Chicago Sun-Times reports:
Dr. Eric E. Whitaker, one of President Barack Obama’s closest friends, was declared a “hostile witness” in the multimillion-dollar fraud trial of a Chicago couple Monday — after an explosive hearing in which Whitaker suggested prosecutors were biased against African-Americans.Dr. Whitaker wants to have a conservation on race. No word yet on this story from Barack Obama or Eric Holder.
U.S. District Judge Richard Mills declared Whitaker “hostile” just minutes after Whitaker testified in his Springfield courtroom in the trial of businessman Leon Dingle Jr. and his wife, Karin Dingle.
On the witness stand for more than two hours, Whitaker voiced concerns that the Justice Department’s pursuit of state grant-fraud cases in the Central District of Illinois has been racially motivated.
Prosecutors have charged the Dingles and eight other people in six different cases, most of which involve no-bid grants and contracts that began being doled out when Whitaker headed the Illinois Department of Public Health for former Gov. Rod Blagojevich between 2003 and 2007.
Of those 10 people, only one of them — Karin Dingle — is white, while the rest are black.
“Almost everybody who’s been indicted or scrutinized has been African-American. That’s what I mentioned to you,” Whitaker, who also is black, told Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy A. Bass. “What I don’t support is a selective investigation.”
