Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano may have to testify before the Senate as part of an investigation in to Secret Service prostitution scandal.
“We have launched an inquiry and investigation and we will hold hearings on the Secret Service crisis, scandal, whatever you want to call it,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., chair of the Homeland Security & Government Affairs Committee, announced on CBS’s Face the Nation this morning.
He added that the committee might summon Napolitano, because the U.S. Secret Service falls within her bailiwick. “The Secret Service is placed within the Department of Homeland Security now, so [they] in that sense a part of her administrate oversight,” Lieberman said. “We haven’t decided on witnesses but we will sure be talking to her about what her department’s going to do.”
With a Secret Service agent who had stayed in President Obama’s hotel now also placed on “administrative leave,” Lieberman indicated some concern that the prositution scandal extended to the White House staff.
“The twelfth Agent now put on administrative leave as of Friday was not staying at the Caribe Hotel where the other agents were, but at the Hilton,” Lieberman explained. “And the Hilton is significant because that’s where President Obama was going to stay. Now we don’t know at this point what that twelfth agent is– is being charged with and why he’s been put on administrative leave. But now you’re into the hotel where the President of the United States was going to stay. And it– it just gets more troubling.”
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has been very cagey when asked about the possibility that White House staffers were involved in the prostitution party.
