From the Washington Post:
Erroll Southers, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Transportation Security Administration, has withdrawn his name from consideration, the White House said Wednesday.
Southers’s nomination had faced fierce opposition from Republicans, especially since revelations that he may have misled Congress about an incident in the late 1980s involving a background check of the boyfriend of his ex-wife.
As The Eye was the first to report in November, Southers told the Senate that he asked a co-worker’s husband who worked for the San Diego Police Department at the time to run a background check on his ex-wife’s boyfriend.
The incident did little to stop his unanimous confirmation by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. But a day after the panel referred his nomination to the Senate, Southers told lawmakers that he twice conducted the database searches himself, downloaded confidential law enforcement records about the boyfriend and then passed the information on to the police department employee.