Aides knew of possible White House link to Cartagena, Colombia, prostitution scandal
As nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military were punished or fired following a 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia, Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that anyone from the White House was involved.
But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged.
The information that the Secret Service shared with the White House included hotel records and firsthand accounts — the same types of evidence the agency and military relied on to determine who in their ranks was involved.
The Secret Service shared its findings twice in the weeks after the scandal with top White House officials, including then-White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. Each time, she and other presidential aides conducted an interview with the advance-team member and concluded that he had done nothing wrong.
Meanwhile, the new details also show that a separate set of investigators in the inspector general’s office of the Department of Homeland Security — tasked by a Senate committee with digging more deeply into misconduct on the trip — found additional evidence from records and eyewitnesses who had accompanied the team member in Colombia.
The lead investigator later told Senate staffers that he felt pressure from his superiors in the office of Charles K. Edwards, who was then the acting inspector general, to withhold evidence — and that, in the heat of an election year, decisions were being made with political considerations in mind.
“We were directed at the time . . . to delay the report of the investigation until after the 2012 election,” David Nieland, the lead investigator on the Colombia case for the DHS inspector general’s office, told Senate staffers, according to three people with knowledge of his statement.
Nieland added that his superiors told him “to withhold and alter certain information in the report of investigation because it was potentially embarrassing to the administration.”
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Within the inspector general’s office, investigators and their bosses fought heatedly with each other over whether to pursue White House team members’ possible involvement. Office staffers who raised questions about a White House role said they were put on administrative leave as a punishment for doing so. Later, Edwards, the acting inspector general, resigned amid allegations of misconduct stemming in part from the dispute.
Also, the way the White House handled the scandal remains a sore point among rank-and-file members of the Secret Service more than two years later.
Former and current Secret Service agents said they are angry at the White House’s public insistence that none of its team members were involved and its private decision to not fully investigate one of its own — while their colleagues had their careers ruined or hampered.
Ten members of the Secret Service — ranging from younger, lower-level officers assigned to rope-line security to seasoned members of a counterassault team — lost their jobs because of their actions in Cartagena. The agents were told that they jeopardized national security by drinking excessively and having contact with foreign nationals.
They were treated “radically differently by different parts of the same executive branch,” said Larry Berger, a lawyer who represented many of the agents, who were union members of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.
Given the renewed focus on the Secret Service after recent reports of a series of security lapses, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) wrote to White House chief of staff Denis McDonough last week voicing concerns that “steps were taken by the Administration to cover-up or deflect” White House involvement in the scandal. Chaffetz wrote that it remains unclear how the White House concluded that one of its team members was not involved, and he has requested records of Ruemmler’s review.
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Yet another scandal that the Admin swept under the rug and blamed on others in the 2012 election year. The pattern has repeated in the IRS, HHS, EPA, the State Department ... the fact that so much has been hidden from us from so many parts of the Executive Branch can't be a coincidence. This is obviously be orchestrated from the top. I don't think there has ever been an administration this corrupt.
Joe Biden … putting the Dem in dementia since (at least) 2020.
