House members ratcheted up the pressure on Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy to find out and provide more details about a March 4 incident at the White House. New revelations have raised more questions about the agency’s performance on the night in question.
Clancy, just 30 days into his role as full-fledged chief of the agency, was on Capitol Hill for the third time in a week. He faced a room full of angry lawmakers who upbraided him for failing to launch his own investigation into the latest black mark on the agency’s record. They repeatedly accused him of thwarting their own constitutionally-mandated review by failing to allow several key witnesses to testify before the panel.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, warned Clancy at the beginning of the hearing that the “‘I don’t know’ strategy” will not sit well with the committee.
That didn’t stop Clancy from offering up a long series of non-responsive answers, as well as an explanation that he is allowing the Department of Homeland Security inspector general to conduct its own investigation and has avoided even the appearance of interference with it.
By doing so, he repeatedly said, he is following a Department of Homeland Security memo providing guidance on handling disciplinary matters.
Chaffetz and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the panel’s ranking member, also bitterly complained about Clancy’s decision not to allow four key witnesses to testify before the committee, a decision by the end of the hearing Clancy said he would reconsider if they could do so in a private closed-door setting.
Cummings delivered a brutal monologue against Clancy’s performance so far as chief of the Secret Service and suggested why top officials failed to tell him about the March 4 incident until five days later, when he heard about it through a former agent.
“I believe when the chain of command is broken, there is no command,” Cummings said. “It’s like a body without a head, and when there is no command, there is vulnerability, and the vulnerability goes to the [security] of the president of the United States.”
By the end of the hearing, Chaffetz appeared more incensed than when it began.
“We are not playing games,” he said. “This is the life, safety, and security of the president of the United States and the White House.
“Don’t let anybody get in that gate,” he ordered. “I want to see determination. I want those officers and agents to know we got their back.”
The hearing also began with a bang. Chaffetz, during scathing opening remarks, for the first time publicly showed a video of an incident in which two senior Secret Service agents disrupted an active bomb investigation after allegedly spending the night drinking at a party.
The video showed two senior special agents in a government-owned vehicle approaching a White House checkpoint and nudging aside an orange barrel set to designate an area where officers were investigating a bomb threat outside the White House. The SUV then proceeds within feet of the potential bomb, driving by it.
The Utah Republican also revealed new allegations that the Secret Service may have botched the investigation of the suspicious package itself.
For 17 minutes, Chaffetz reported, traffic continued through the intersection and pedestrians continued to walk by the potential bomb. He also noted that an officer tried to apprehend the person who left the package and claimed that it was a bomb but was unsuccessful.
An officer then followed the suspect in her car but was waived off when another Secret Service official told him he was following the wrong person and directed him to follow a different car, which contained another person, Chaffetz said.
Several times during the hearing, Chaffetz chided the Secret Service for waiting 30 minutes to issue a “be on the lookout” alert for the suspect. The suspect, he said, was arrested three days later by another law enforcement agency even though agents tracked her down at a Northern Virginia hotel lobby, but said they couldn’t arrest her because they lacked an arrest warrant at that point.
While Clancy repeatedly deferred to the DHS inspector general’s investigation when pressed about details of the incident, he provided some limited new information.
Under heavy questioning, Clancy said Alfonso Dyson, the deputy chief of the Secret Service’s uniformed division, should have forwarded information about the incident in question up the chain of command but may not have.
“I was infuriated that I didn’t know of that incident,” he said. “The deputy chief needed to raise that up. I’ve been back [at the agency] for about 30 days, and we’ve been working furiously to break down these barriers when they can’t talk up the chain.”
When asked whether he knew the highest-ranking person who knew about the allegations that night but failed to tell him, Clancy again deferred to the IG probe and told the committee that he never asked his senior leadership team if any of them knew about the incident and failed to tell him.
“I compartmentalized things,” he said, noting that he didn’t want to pressure anyone or be accused of interfering with the newly launched IG investigation.
Lawmakers also tried to drill down into the Secret Service’s policy of erasing surveillance footage every 72 hours unless an incident is identified. Clancy has said he could turn over only limited footage of the night’s events because a supervisor at the White House that night didn’t flag the two officers’ disruption of the active bomb investigation as a potential problem, so the surveillance tape was erased.
An incredulous Rep. Steven Lynch, D-Mass., testified that DHS requires Transportation Security Administration officers at Boston’s Logan International Airport to retain their surveillance tapes for 30 days.
Later Lynch argued that “the local Piggly Wiggly” grocery store in his district maintains 30 days of surveillance taps.
“Coming from an intelligence-gathering organization, it leaves me almost speechless,” he said.
Since the incident, Clancy said the agency has decided to extend the 72-hour policy of preserving tapes to seven days and is reviewing the agency’s storage capacity to see whether it can keep surveillance tapes for a longer period of time.
Clancy also insisted that he is following the correct legal protocols in removing the two senior agents in the car that night from their positions and into non-supervisory, non-operational roles instead of placing them on administrative leave. They will not face greater disciplinary action until the IG wraps up its investigation, he said.
“I thought it was a dangerous path to take, to discipline people in a piecemeal fashion,” he said.
Deep into the hearing, Clancy noted that since the incident in question, he has issued a new, clearer standard about drinking and driving a government-owned vehicle.
The new policy prohibits any Secret Service officer from operating a government-owned vehicle within 10 hours of drinking alcohol.
The previous policy, he said, was not specific about how much employees could drink before getting behind the wheel of a taxpayer-funded car or SUV.
