OKLAHOMA CITY — Jeff Starling, Republican candidate for Oklahoma Attorney General, today drew a sharp line between his political outsider campaign and the career-politician approach of opponent Jon Echols, validating his decisions not to seek endorsements from elected officials, including sitting sheriffs, and pointing to this week’s resignation of Cleveland County Sheriff Chris Amason as proof of why:
“We have a crisis in confidence in the honesty and integrity of Oklahoma’s elected officials,” Starling said. “As Gentner Drummond conceded, when an Attorney General accepts endorsements from elected officials, it creates a conflict of interest. When the AG’s own office has to admit he’s been ‘walled off’ from a corruption case because he traded endorsements with the defendant, the system is broken.”
“Jon Echols has accepted endorsements from a host of insider, elected politicians, including two now-disgraced former sheriffs, and faces the same conflicts of interest as the current Attorney General, who couldn’t investigate or even prosecute Chris Amason directly,” Starling added. “If a want-to-be AG can’t be trusted to respond to Oklahomans’ demands to investigate and prosecute corrupt public officials, it’s disqualifying. That’s the cost of putting politics ahead of defending the people of Oklahoma and the rule of law.”
Oklahoma’s sheriffs and deputies, Starling emphasized, are overwhelmingly honorable public servants — but the Attorney General’s job is to be the one office in state government that can hold any official accountable, including a corrupt sheriff, without picking up a phone first. Recent indictments in Coal County and Cleveland County show what happens when the top law enforcement officer is tangled up in the same political web as the people he’s supposed to hold accountable.
Echols endorsed Amason and is endorsed by Amason, even if he’s now hiding it on his campaign website.
“I’m a practicing attorney and a businessman, not a career politician trading favors for endorsements from other politicians,” Starling said. “I don’t need a wall around my office because I’m not making the deals that require one. Oklahoma taxpayers deserve a trusted AG who answers to them — not to whoever showed up at the endorsement event.”
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