Here’s something that screams dishonesty and self-preservation so loudly it splits your eardrums.

East Baton Rouge Council on Aging Executive Director Tasha Clark-Amar spoke publicly Wednesday for the first time since a family accused her of coercing their elderly grandmother to place Amar in charge of her estate for $500 a month.

Amar said she wants to withdraw from being named the overseer of the estate belonging to Helen Plummer, who died in early March at age 95, and that she never intended to accept the $500 a month payment for taking care of the estate. She acknowledged no wrongdoing, but also said she would not agree to oversee another client’s will in the future and that she had made no similar agreements with other clients.

Amar wants to instead name another Council On Aging employee as the executrix of that will, as though that somehow takes the stink off this fiasco. There is no less a conflict of interest in a different COA employee taking something of value from a COA client than if the director does it.

And now for a bald-faced lie…

Amar said she did not know that Plummer — who both she and Plummer’s grandchildren have said lived frugally — had any assets until after she died. Court documents show that there is at least $314,000 in the trust that Plummer left to her great-grandchildren and grandniece.

Amar is specified in the will as both “independent executrix” and “trustee” of Plummer’s estate. For being “trustee,” Amar is supposed to collect a flat fee of $500 a month over the next 20 years until the youngest beneficiary turns 30.

She didn’t know that the estate she signed on to be an executrix of had any money in it? Really? Exactly how stupid does this woman think we all are by making so preposterous a statement?

Tomorrow, the lawsuit that blew this case up into the local media will be in front of Judge Don Johnson for a hearing. Which is why Amar is making these representations about not wanting the money and being willing to give up her status as executrix of the estate. She has to do that in an effort to make this look like a selfless action on her part rather than the grasping manipulation it so obviously is.

But there’s a bigger issue here. Tasha Clark Amar is becoming a political liability, and that’s bad for everybody in the Democrat machine in Baton Rouge given the get-out-the-vote engine she’s turning the COA into. She has to save herself in order that no damage to the machine is sustained from this mess. So a settlement will get made and the Plummers will be off the hook, and somebody else’s money will pay Tasha Clark Amar to supplement the $104,000 she’s already making.

Perhaps she’ll just get a big raise when that $8 million a year in property tax money starts hitting the COA bank account next spring.