The White House Wednesday dodged questions about whether President Obama was trying to send a pointed message by appointing the first woman ever to head the Secret Service, an agency still struggling to recover from a high-profile sex scandal.
President Obama on Tuesday appointed the first woman ever to head the Secret Service, an agency still struggling to recover from a high-profile sex scandal.
Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan's retirement last month is an opportunity to require Senate confirmation of any successor.
Mark Sullivan , the head of the Secret Service is stepping down after 30 years with the agency.
One U.S. Secret Service special agent drank too much alcohol and got caught after a minor traffic accident. Another agent got nabbed after driving into a telephone pole. Yet another got arrested after getting stuck in a ditch.
The lawmaker leading an inquiry into the Secret Service prostitution scandal reported dozens of "troubling" episodes of past misbehavior Wednesday and appealed to insiders to come forward with what they know as investigators try to determine whether a culture of misconduct took root in the storied agency.
The director of the Secret Service told Congress on Wednesday that the recent Colombian prostitution scandal was a one-time occurrence, but deeply skeptical lawmakers said he is in denial and the evidence points to a larger pattern of misconduct within the agency charged with protecting the president.
The chairman of the Senate committee with jurisdiction over homeland security says he's scheduled a hearing for May 23 to review the Secret Service investigation of the Colombia prostitution scandal.
The federal government by definition has to make a federal case out of everything it touches, from mandating toilets that barely flush to prescribing how many calories must go into a schoolboy's lunch. So we can't be surprised that the Secret Service will assign nannies and chaperones to monitor the bedtime behavior of the president's bodyguards on their trips abroad.
The director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, could have retired from government nearly 10 years ago and avoided the scandal of the White House gate-crashers and, more recently, the one involving a dozen agents, officers and supervisors implicated in a prostitution case.
Embarrassed by a prostitution scandal, the Secret Service will assign chaperones on some trips to enforce new rules of conduct that make clear that excessive drinking, entertaining foreigners in their hotel rooms and cavorting in disreputable establishments are no longer tolerated.
Seeking to shake the disgrace of a prostitution scandal, the Secret Service late Friday tightened conduct rules for its agents to prohibit them from drinking excessively, visiting disreputable establishments while traveling or bringing foreigners to their hotel rooms.
Expanding the prostitution investigation, the Secret Service acknowledged Thursday it is checking whether its employees hired strippers and prostitutes in advance of President Barack Obama's visit last year to El Salvador.
Most of the Secret Service agents embroiled in a South American prostitution scandal are likely to lose their jobs — some as soon as Monday — a powerful Republican lawmaker said Sunday.
Two key Republican lawmakers predicted Sunday that more Secret Service employees will lose their jobs as a result of the prostitution scandal that has embroiled the federal agency in recent days.
Mr. Sullivan apologized for the embarrassing episode in Colombia and later announced he would step down after a 30-year career.
"I have tried to figure this out for a month and a half - what would ever possess people to exhibit this type of behavior?" he said. "And I can tell you that I do not think this is indicative of the overwhelming majority of our men and women. ... But I just think that between the alcohol, and I don't know, the environment, these individuals did some really dumb things."
Alcohol plays role in reports involving the Secret Service →
