Obama's friend in trouble with Chicago law

Daily Beast - In potentially the first serious scandal to involve the president’s inner circle, federal prosecutors want Eric Whitaker labeled a ‘hostile witness’ in a businessman’s fraud trial.

Eric Whitaker is one of Barack Obama’s closest friends, a doctor with degrees from Harvard and the University of Chicago, and a member of the board of trustees of Grinnell College, the elite liberal arts school in Iowa. On Tuesday, federal prosecutors asked that “hostile witness in a fraud trial” be added to Whitaker’s list of honorifics, as well.

Prosecutors say Whitaker, who is so close to the Obamas that he said it felt like “my extended family is leaving town” after the 2008 presidential election, is being uncooperative in the fraud trial of businessman Leon Dingle. The Chicago businessman stands accused of pocketing more than $3 million in grants he got from Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s Illinois Department of Public Health to educate minority populations in Chicago about diseases like AIDS, breast cancer, and cervical cancer. Instead the money allegedly was spent on luxury cars and a yacht club membership, among other things. The result is that Dingle now faces a 23-count federal indictment. He has pleaded not guilty.