Eric Whitaker has known Obama for a long time and played basketball with him. He is now close to being called a “hostile witness” in a Chicago corruption case.
Whitaker was the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health from 2003 to 2007. He has “not been charged with wrongdoing,” but it seems that taxpayer money from programmes he oversaw keeps going to the wrong people.
Carol Felsenthal, a reporter for Chicago Magazine, noticed last year that the sentence “Whitaker hasn’t been charged with wrongdoing” has been in almost every news story about the scandals that have been going on around him for years, but he has stayed clean so far.
In 2003, when Obama was still a state senator, he used his connections to get Whitaker a job at the Department of Health. Using Tony Rezko, who is now in jail, as a go-between, Obama, who was a state senator at the time, recommended Whitaker to Gov. Blagojevich, who is also now in jail.
Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun Times says, “The Department of Public Health also got involved in a scandal while Whitaker was in charge. He was in charge of the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board’s budget. This board is in charge of approving medical building projects. Testimony at Rezko’s trial showed that he and his friends ran that board, which they used to ask for bribes and kickbacks. Rezko was given a sentence. Whitaker said he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day work of the board, and he was never accused of doing anything wrong.
Whitaker, like Obama, never seems to know what his subordinates are doing.
He left the Illinois Department of Public Health at the end of 2007 to work with Michelle Obama at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported:
One of President Barack Obama’s closest friends, Dr. Eric E. Whitaker, has refused to answer federal prosecutors’ questions about whether he had a “sexual relationship” with a former aide who pleaded guilty to stealing $400,000 in taxpayer money in a scheme that started when Whitaker was her boss at the Illinois Department of Public Health.
On August 7, 2013, prosecutors charged Quinshaunta R. Golden, who was Whitaker’s chief of staff at the state agency, with bribery and theft. The next day, Whitaker told reporters that he was “fully cooperating” with the investigation by the federal government.
In fact, prosecutors say that Whitaker had already stopped helping by that time. Since then, he has refused to talk to investigators, and he could now be called as a “hostile witness” in a case against two other people who are also accused of stealing from taxpayers, according to a court transcript obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Keith Koffler of White House Dossier says, “Obama hasn’t backed away from Whitaker, even though his former staffers are being investigated and he seems to be stonewalling.”
You could also say that Whitaker has not moved away from Obama, even though his administration is being investigated and he is “seemingly stonewalling.”