Gov. Ralph DLG Torres said Friday that he absolutely is not going to resign, despite unfavorable testimony in the House of Representatives Judiciary and Governmental Operations Committee hearing that is looking into his expenditures of public funds and travels.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no reason for me to resign,\u201d said Torres when asked during his regular radio news briefing if he ever thinks of resigning from office in the wake of the JGO investigation where committee chair Rep. Celina R. Babauta had asked Lt. Gov. Arnold I. Palacios if he believes there is sufficient reason and justification to call for the immediate resignation of Torres or move for his impeachment. Palacios had replied that doing so is a legislative prerogative. Palacios appeared before the JGO Committee last Wednesday in response to a subpoena.<\/p>\n
When asked about Palacios\u2019 testimony, the governor said Palacios made the comments already \u201cso he is just going to move forward on what he needs to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
As to the question whether Palacios gave a truthful testimony, Torres didn\u2019t give a direct response. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be the one to say whether it\u2019s accurate or not,\u201d the governor said.<\/p>\n
On whether he plans to testify by himself or with counsel before the committee, Torres said they will deal with it when they get that subpoena. He said the committee had already voted to issue him a subpoena so he will just wait for that.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve told this in the beginning, I said, \u2018Hey, call me in so we can hash this out and answer these questions, the concerns that you have,\u201d the governor said. <\/p>\n
He said it\u2019s been several months already and the JGO never did call him. \u201cThey\u2019re choosing to go this route. They brought in officers, they brought in other people and yet they haven\u2019t called me,\u201d Torres said. <\/p>\n
This means, Torres said, that the JGO Committee already has a goal and agenda before all this process.<\/p>\n
The House is controlled by the Democrats. Torres is the titular head of the NMI Republican Party. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gov. Ralph DLG Torres said Friday that he absolutely is not going to resign, despite…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":351232,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-351945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}