President Obama is closing in on a new candidate to lead the Secret Service in the wake of a bruising year for the agency and a recent purging of its top brass.
The agency’s interim director, Joseph Clancy, is among the top candidates under consideration for the permanent director job. It’s still unclear, however, whether the president will follow or reject the advice of an independent review panel that strongly recommended that the next director come from outside the Secret Service to fully reform the agency.
The panel, in its sharply worded report released in December, said the Secret Service was “starved for leadership” and determined that its top officials were too “insular,” operated like an old-boys network and lacked a “culture of accountability.”
“The problems exposed by recent events go deeper than a new fence can fix…” the report by the four-person panel said. “Only a director from outside the service, removed from organizational traditions and personal relationships, will be able to do the honest top-to-bottom reassessment” required to truly reform the agency.
Clancy formerly served as chief of the agency’s Presidential Protective Division and was by Obama’s side whenever he traveled. Other names in the mix include Sean Joyce, the former deputy director of the FBI; Terrance Gainer, former chief of the Capitol Police and a Senate sergeant-at-arms; and Chief Cathy Lanier of the Metropolitan Police in Washington.
Clancy is respected and well-liked outside and inside the service, and Obama knows him well and trusts him. He had already retired from the agency and was serving as the head of Comcast’s security operations when Obama called on him to take the job of acting director.
He was Obama’s first choice to help restore the the agency’s reputation after a string of Secret Service security lapses last year, including a knife-carrying fence-jumper who managed to penetrate the ceremonial heart of the White House.
While most members of Congress have heaped praise on Clancy for leaving the private sector to help right the embattled agency last year, at times his deep ties to the agency have been a blessing and a bit of a curse.
During a November hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Clancy had a difficult time answering questions about the agency’s failings and his deep ties to many of the top-level officials may have contributed to a reluctance to oust the agency’s second-in-command.
During the November hearing, Clancy testified that at the time the agency still hadn’t disciplined any employees for several agency public misstatements about the September fence-jumping incident and a decision to divert agents guarding the perimeter of the White House to the home of a staffer in Maryland.
About the misstatements, Clancy said he didn’t know why the Secret Service never acted to correct the false details of an initial false statement that the fence-jumper was detained just inside the White House North Portico doors and was not armed. In reality, the fence-jumper was carrying a knife, blew through the unlocked front doors and made it into the East Room before agents wrestled him to the ground.
“So they just let that linger out there in perpetuity?” Rep. Jason Chaffetz asked.
The Utah Republican also asked Clancy about Operation Moonlight, which involved the diversion of agents from a “prowler” vehicle monitoring the perimeter of the White House to La Plata, Md., to check on the safety of an administrative assistant to the then-director.
The DHS inspector general in late October issued a memo concluding that Secret Service officials erred in ordering Operation Moonlight and said it showed a “serious lapse in judgment” and wasn’t “legally or procedurally” justified.
Pressed on whether he believed the operation reduced White House security, Clancy referred to the inspector general’s report in which the agents interviewed about it said it did not affect the protection of the president.
Asked whether anyone was punished for the incidents, Clancy appeared to say that at least in the communications misstatements, it “was not an intentional violation of the code” and in all the examples “there was no discipline administered.”
The response appeared to strike a nerve with Chaffetz.
“With all due respect … until you actually live by your own codes and you hold people responsible and accountable, you’re going to continue to have this problem,” Chaffetz concluded.
In reviewing Operation Moonlight, the DHS inspector general found that A.T. Smith, who up until earlier this week served as deputy director and managed day-to-day agency operations during the time of several security failings, ordered the diversion of agents to Maryland.
Smith had survived an early January shakeup Clancy ordered involving four top Secret Service officials who were re-assigned to other jobs at DHS.
He and Clancy were scheduled to appear at Thursday’s House Oversight hearing, but earlier this week, the panel announced a change in the lineup.
That change occurred after Clancy announced that Smith, who is close to retirement age and service, had stepped down from his No. 2 post and was re-assigned to an unspecified job inside the highly regarded Homeland Security Investigations unit in the Immigrations and Custom Enforcement.
Both agencies fall under the Department of Homeland Security.
In his statement announcing the move, Clancy praised Smith for his 29 years of service and said his “contributions to the agency have been invaluable.”
During Thursday’s hearing, members of the independent panel that reviewed problems at the agency reiterated their strong belief that someone from outside the agency would be better suited to truly shake up and reform it.
“We gave a lot of attention to leadership,” said Mark Filip, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis who also served as deputy attorney general at the end of President George W. Bush’s second term.
“We fully respect that the choice of a Secret Service director is that of the president’s…” he said, “and there’s a unique relationship there — maybe [the most] unique amongst appointments in the federal system” because of the person’s responsibility for the personal safety of the president and the first family.
Another review board member, Thomas Perrelli, who served in the early years of the Obama administration as associate attorney general, the third-highest-ranking post at the Justice Department, said the panel continues to recommend an outside person.
It’s important, he said, that “the new director, whoever that is, is protected to make tough choices about personnel, independent of any sort of old-boys network or friendships or alignments.”
