The Secret Service is disputing a report that an agent working on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012 leaked President Obama’s travel schedule to Romney campaign staff.
The story first appeared on the opinion website InsideSources, which is run by Romney’s former Iowa communications director, Shawn McCoy.
A Secret Service official told the Washington Examiner that the agency considered it improbable that an agent working as a Romney security detail had access to Obama’s travel schedule. That schedule, according to McCoy, included the locations and timing of Obama’s planned campaign events.
“The President’s schedule is not distributed outside a Secret Service Presidential Detail operations office until it’s officially announced by the White House,” the official told the Examiner. “A field office-based agent conducting campaign advances would generally not have access to this information.”
According to McCoy, the agent had a romantic interest in one of the Romney staffers. Other Romney campaign employees witnessed the agent disclosing the President’s travel info to the staffer he was pursuing romantically, McCoy reported.
The same agent, according to the InsideSources story, “provided joy rides in a Secret Service vehicle with the lights flashing.”
Secret Service officials, however, questioned whether an agent aiding the campaign would have access to an agency car.
When contacted by the Examiner, McCoy stood by his story.
“All of the details included in the story were independently verified by both of the sources who witnessed the events,” McCoy said. “I spoke with the Secret Service about the story, but they declined to offer any response.”
