Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who has led the charge for more Secret Service accountability for more than a year, said he plans to closely scrutinize whether the Secret Service played favorites with agents in determining their punishment after a Colombia prostitution scandal.
Examining the Cartagena scandal, and the way the agency responded to it, would help determine why resentment is running so high and morale so low at the elite agency charged with protecting the president and the first family, the Utah Republican said.
“Nearly two dozen people were given varying degrees of punishment for the same behavior,” he said. “The explanations are that some people had better political connections in the office — and that’s a very serious charge.”
Chaffetz also said he plans to “get to the bottom” of the circumstances surrounding a twentysomething White House staffer who the Secret Service believed also hired a prostitute the same night as agents and members of the military did.
“If they’ve completed an internal review at the White House, then share it with us — that should not be a difficult ask,” he said.
Eric Schultz, the president’s spokesman, said late Wednesday that he conducted an internal review of the prostitution scandal and “did not identify any inappropriate behavior on the part of the White House advance team.”
Schultz also denied suggestions that the White House interfered with an inspector general’s investigation in the matter.
Two years after the prostitution scandal, important questions linger about the Secret Service and White House response.
A Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office spent eight months looking into the scandal but significant parts of the report have been called into question after Charles Edwards, the acting IG at the time, was charged with his own ethical lapses.
He resigned in December and was transferred to a different division after the Senate found that he was breaching basic inspector general protocol by cozying up to senior DHS officials and playing politics with the report. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson later placed him on administrative leave.
Edwards put three members of his own investigative team on administrative leave during the prostitution investigation after they complained that their managers were steering them away from angles that could be harmful to President Obama’s re-election campaign, which was in full swing at the time.
“It does not seem like a coincidence — it is not a regular occurrence to put [OIG] staff on administrative leave,” Chaffetz said.
Chaffetz, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a top contender to head the panel next year, said he has “great faith” in new DHS Inspector General John Roth, who Obama appointed in March.
“I have every reason to believe he will be a man of integrity,” Chaffetz said.
Chaffetz also had strong praise for Joseph Clancy, the man chosen as the interim Secret Service director to head the agency after Julia Pierson stepped down from the top spot last week. Clancy left the agency in 2011 to head security at Comcast.
Ultimately, though, Chaffetz believes that only a new director from the private sector can truly change the entrenched culture and fix the myriad problems at the tarnished agency.
Chaffetz, who also sits on the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees, which both have jurisdiction over the Secret Service, also said Congress needs to appoint an independent commission to investigate the agency, in addition to the internal DHS review Johnson announced last week.
“What I’m going to insist on is that there be a truly independent review of four key areas: “training, culture, leadership and protocols.”
“These are the four things that are fundamentally wrong at the Secret Service,” he said. “They are not going to turn that ship around tomorrow,” but they can start to make real progress in these key areas.
In addition, he and other Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill want a thorough examination of three other major incidents: the fence-jumping incident at the White House on Sept. 19, another security breach involving an armed man in an elevator with Obama just three days earlier, and an incident in which a man sprayed the upper White House residence with bullets and the agency didn’t tell Obama for days afterward.
