One of the members of a review board investigating the White House fence-jumping incident has close ties to former top officials that critics say pose conflicts of interest.
Joe Hagin, who served as former deputy chief of White House staff of operations before leaving for a corporate affairs position at Chiquita Brands International, spent 14 years overseeing security-related issues at the White House compound and presidential travel during the George W. Bush administration.
During the Bush years, Hagin recommended the president appoint Mark Sullivan as director of the Secret Service, according to sources familiar with Hagin’s tenure. He also recommended Ralph Basham to the position of director of the Secret Service’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and later to commissioner of the sprawling Customs and Border Protection agency, sources said.
Bush eventually tapped Sullivan and Basham for those posts.
Several critics of the Secret Service within the agency and in the broader federal law enforcement community have said one of the most serious problems the agency faces is its insular culture. They question whether the panelists Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson appointed could see beyond their strong business, political and personal ties to make the necessary changes.
Todd Keil, a former Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary who held several top positions at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, told the Washington Examiner that Hagin’s close ties to former and current top agency officials undermine Hagin’s independence.
Hagin’s appointment, Keil said, is “the complete opposite of what you want to do when you’re naming a panel in circumstances like this — it goes against everything people were hoping it would be and do.”
Sources cite a web of alliances and business ties that could prevent Hagin from approaching the review in an unbiased way.
After serving nearly seven years as director, Sullivan retired in early 2013 after a scandal involving more than a dozen agents’ involvement with prostitutes in Colombia.
Sullivan was also director when an incident occurred in 2011 in which a shooter sprayed the upper White House residence with bullets. The Secret Service only told the first family about the incident days later, after a domestic staffer found bullet holes in the residence.
Basham, who served as director of the Secret Service from 2003 to 2006, spent 38 years in federal law enforcement, serving in senior leadership positions at four of the eight components or agencies that now make up DHS.
Basham and Hagin now work together at Command Consulting Group, an international security and intelligence firm they founded in 2009, along with Steve Atkiss, Basham’s chief of staff at the CBP. Atkiss also served as special assistant to the president for operations and deputy director of White House advance work.
During his time at the White House, Hagin also worked closely with two other former high-ranking Secret Service officials who went on to join Command Consulting: Mickey Nelson and Edward Marinzel.
Sullivan founded his own private global-security consulting firm, GSIS, with other former top Homeland Security and CBP officials, including Noah Kroloff , who served as chief of staff to then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.
Senate investigators last year looked into whether Kroloff and John Sandweg, Napolitano’s then-general counsel, improperly influenced then-DHS acting Inspector General Charles Edwards’ investigation into the Secret Service Colombia prostitute scandal.
The final Senate report did not cite Kroloff or Sandweg by name but faulted Edwards for failing to “uphold the independence” of his office and for altering and delaying reports and investigations to “accommodate senior DHS officials.” Edwards resigned the post in December and has been on administrative leave since early May.
Hagin didn’t return an emailed request for comment, and a spokeswoman for Command Consulting referred questions to DHS.
DHS spokeswoman Marsha Catron defended Hagin’s independence and experience in an emailed statement to the Examiner.
“As Secretary Johnson has said, Joe Hagin is familiar with the role and responsibilities of the U.S. Secret Service and has the utmost confidence in his ability to conduct a fair, thorough and unbiased assessment,” she said.
“As the former White House deputy chief of staff for operations to President George W. Bush, Joe has the background and experience to provide his recommendations along with the other members of the panel for Secretary Johnson’s review.”
The White House didn’t respond to an inquiry.
Along with Hagin, Johnson appointed several former high-ranking attorneys with the Bush and Obama administrations to the four-member Secret Service review panel.
Those panelists are: Tom Perrelli, a former associate attorney general in the Obama administration; Mark Filip, a former deputy attorney general in the Bush administration; and Danielle Gray, an attorney who served as special assistant and associate counsel to Obama and worked on the Supreme Court nominations and confirmations of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Newsweek in 2013 called Gray an “internal diplomat” and the “most powerful [White House] staffer you’ve never heard of.”
Critics of Hagin’s appointment who spoke to the Washington Examiner are less concerned about the appointment of Perelli, Filip and Gray, although they question their close political ties to either the Obama or Bush administrations.
When Johnson appointed the panelists Friday, he asked them to submit recommendations for a new director of the Secret Service and sought their advice on whether, “given the series of recent events,” there should be a review of broader issues concerning the Secret Service.
“I have full confidence that these distinguished individuals will conduct a fair, thorough and unbiased assessment,” he said at the time.
But critics of the Secret Service have serious doubts. Top agency officials, they argue, have a long history of favoring high-ranking supervisors on the “eighth floor” of headquarters where the agency’s top brass have their offices, and protecting them from being punished for misconduct or protocol breaches that would ruin lower-ranking agents’ careers.
Keil testified at a recent House hearing about the need for a truly independent review board to investigate the cultural problems at the Secret Service.
It was the same hearing in which former Secret Service Director Julia Pierson’s poor performance and explanations about the fence-jumping incident led to her resignation.
When Johnson announced the panelists, he tasked them with examining security failures at the White House compound.
Keil said he was heartened to hear that Johnson also wanted the panelists to let him know whether a broader review of the problems within the Secret Service is necessary.
“If that answer comes back as a ‘no,’ and that next broader review is not done by a panel of people from the outside, then the whole thing will be viewed as a whitewash,” Keil said.
A truly independent panel would include people with no ties to the Secret Service and fewer political connections, Kiel argued. He suggested top military generals or leaders of police departments in major cities with “no-nonsense” reputations and records of turning them around.
Rep. Jason Chafettz, R-Utah, who was one of the first lawmakers to call on Pierson to resign, said a “truly independent panel” would include people who had “wielded guns before” but who hadn’t worked directly for the Homeland Security Department or Secret Service or with those agencies’ top officials.
“I don’t need a room full of attorneys,” he told the Examiner.
Chaffetz, who sits on the Oversight, Homeland Security and Judiciary panels, said Congress should form a bipartisan panel to put together a “truly independent group” and one that is “devoid of any conflict.”
The Utah Republican, a leading candidate to become chairman of the Oversight Committee in the new year, argues that Obama should name an outside person to run the Secret Service for one of the first times in its 149-year history.
Several sources inside and outside the Secret Service have expressed a dire need for a new director to be appointed from outside the agency.
One 25-year veteran of the Secret Service, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, cited numerous examples of favoritism and double standards by top officials.
“Yes, it is time for a new director/deputy director to be hired from outside the agency to clean house on the eighth floor [and remove] friends of the past directors,” the source told the Examiner.
Concerns about the Secret Service extend much farther than security breaches. The agency and the White House face new scrutiny after the Washington Post last week reported that the White House never acknowledged a former aide’s involvement in the prostitution scandal even though the Secret Service provided detailed evidence suggesting he may have been.
The aide denies that he hired a prostitute. White House spokesman Eric Schultz said last week that White House conducted an internal review of the prostitution scandal and “did not identify any inappropriate behavior on the part of the White House advance team aide.
Schultz also denied suggestions that the White House interfered with the inspector general’s investigation.
In Hagin’s latest White House post where he served from 2001 to 2008, he was in charge of overseeing the security of Air Force One and all presidential airlift operations, including the Marine helicopter squadron, the Secret Service’s Presidential Protection Division, along with all presidential scheduling and travel, according a biography posted on the website for Command Consulting.
During the Bush years, he served as deputy assistant to the president, leading the post-Sept. 11 effort to reorganize and modernize the “structure and methodology” for presidential protection and was “one of the principals responsible for planning the formation of DHS,” according to his biography.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Hagin had worked in the Obama administration. He did not.
