It’s Not the Crime, It’s What Else the White House May Be Covering Up

The Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig has the details of yet another damaging Obama scandal:

As nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military were punished or fired following a 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia, Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that anyone from the White House was involved.
But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged.

As bad as that is, it gets much worse:

“We were directed at the time . . . to delay the report of the investigation until after the 2012 election,” David Nieland, the lead investigator on the Colombia case for the DHS inspector general’s office, told Senate staffers, according to three people with knowledge of his statement.

Finally, how’s this for an unreal detail? Jonathan Dach, the White House volunteer who allegedly had this liaison with the prostitute, “this year started working full time in the Obama administration on a federal contract as a policy adviser in the Office on Global Women’s Issues at the State Department.” It almost goes without saying that Dach is also the son of a prominent Democratic donor and former lobbyist.

As is often the case, we’ll hear a lot in the next few days about how the cover-up here is worse than the crime. Prostitution is, after all, legal in Cartagena. Still, the episode is more telling than White House would like. It speaks to this White House’s extraordinary lack of professionalism and competency, and it’s yet another example of how hollow and nakedly political the White House’s “war on women” rhetoric really is.

But most importantly, it says a lot about what this White House is capable of. The White House is willing to hush up an investigation of a 25-year-old volunteer’s dalliance with a prostitute because of concerns about electoral consequences, and yet we’re supposed to believe that the White House has such integrity they wouldn’t lie about, say, what happened in Benghazi, regardless of the election fallout?

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