Spokane County Prosecutor Larry Haskell has officially apologized and attempted to distance himself from his wife’s racist rants on social media, but defense attorneys, experts in legal ethics and civil libertarians think his office and reputation are damaged, maybe beyond repair.

Lesley Haskell, 57, has found herself in the eye of a hurricane-force storm of controversy after the Inlander alternative newspaper in Spokane published a story on Jan. 27 excerpting a string of posts on the conservative social media site Gab.com in which she freely used slurs referring to Blacks, Jews, Latinos and other ethnic groups — defending those statements as “free speech.” She had declared herself a “proud white nationalist” and held up the Ku Klux Klan as a beacon of “white culture.”

In those posts, she appears to embrace the QAnon theory that Donald Trump remains the U.S. president, has posted photographs of herself with members of the far-right Proud Boys and, in one, declared that “white people need to start having more babies.”

Larry Haskell, who has served two terms as Spokane County’s elected prosecutor and has announced his intentions to seek a third this year, has rejected any notion that he holds similar views. Haskell, a former B-1 bomber pilot and graduate of Seattle University School of Law, met his wife while both were serving in the Air Force.