Sordid Secret Service Scandal

[jimmy olsen]

As requested.

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/17/11251326-nbc-prostitutes-50-fee-for-two-agents-triggered-secret-service-scandal?lite

NBC: Prostitute's $50 fee for two agents triggered Secret Service scandal

By Michael Isikoff and Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News

The Colombian prostitute who triggered the scandal that has rocked the Secret Service got angry with two agents who refused to pay her full price for servicing the two of them, leading to a financial dispute over between $40 and $60, according to a government source who has been briefed on the investigation.

Two agents from the service's elite Counter Assault Team, in Cartagena, Colombia, in advance of President Barack Obama's arrival for the Summit of the Americas over the weekend, had procured the women's services at a local strip club called the Pley Club on the evening of April 11. All the Secret Service agents and officers implicated in the scandal are believed to have gone to the club that evening and brought back women, a U.S. official told NBC News.
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The controversy arose after one of the women went back to a hotel room with two agents. The woman wanted to be paid for serving both agents, the source who has been briefed on the probe told NBC News. Instead, the agents would only agree to split her price, prompting the woman to complain to local police who were stationed in the lobby of the Hotel Caribe, the source said.

The police then went up to the agents' room and began banging on the door, which the agents at first refused to open, the source said. There are conflicting reports over how the payment dispute was resolved. But two government sources told NBC News the police contacted the U.S. Embassy over the dispute and Embassy officials then arrived at the scene.

All those with booked rooms at the hotel had to pay a fee of $25 for bringing any guests to their  rooms -- and the guests were required to leave some form of identification at the front desk. A quick scan of the hotel register by a U.S. Embassy official established that 11 Secret Service agents had brought back women to their rooms that evening. When Embassy officials notified Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, he immediately ordered all the agents to fly home, the sources said.

The Secret Service members -- including agents and uniformed officers -- were stripped of their security clearances on Monday.

Included in that group were two high-level Secret Service supervisors, three counter assault officers whose job is to repel attacks and three sniper-team members, who take to rooftops to secure areas where the president might visit, NBC News reported.

U.S. officials have described the agents' conduct as a potential security breach especially because all the agents involved had access to the president's day-by-day, minute-by-minute schedule. But one official familiar with the security arrangements said that there were no specific security threats during the president's trip. Although agents upon arrival were briefed about current activities by leftist FARC guerrillas and local drug cartels, they were told neither had made any specific threats to the president.

The only specific security concern mentioned was that agents and officers were told to bar a left-wing journalist from events at the summit and were given a flier with the journalist's photograph to keep him out, the law enforcement source said.

The Secret Service sent agents to Colombia to interview the prostitutes who hooked up Americans to figure out if the women are under age, involved with terrorism or trafficking in illegal drugs, a lawmaker told NBC News' Luke Russert on Tuesday.

"They have all their IDs and are conducting an extensive background check to make sure they aren't affiliated with any narcotrafficking or terrorist group or that they could be minors," Homeland Security chairman Rep. Peter King told Russert. "So far there is no security breach."

King, who was briefed on the Colombia investigation by Sullivan, confirmed that there were 11 agents and 11 women.

"The investigation could take a while simply because of the amount of women involved," King said. "Some are saying they were prostitutes and others say they weren't."

U.S. military officials told NBC News on Tuesday that 10 American servicemen also were under investigation. According to the officials that includes five Army soldiers, two Navy sailors, two Marines and one Air Force airman.

One military official says it appears that at least two of the service members were found with prostitutes in their hotel rooms, the same Hotel Caribe where the Secret Service detail stayed.

It's not clear whether any of the military members were in any way connected to the allegations involving members of the Secret Service at a Cartagena strip club.

It's also not yet clear whether any of the 10 will face criminal charges.

House and Senate lawmakers are also looking into the allegations. King told The Associated Press that his committee is devoting four investigators to the probe.
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Meanwhile, one former Secret Service agent, Dan Bongino who is a Republican candidate for Congress in Maryland, told NBC News that in his 12 years at the agency he never saw anything like what is alleged to have taken place in Colombia.

"I'm not saying it's never happened, but I never saw it." Bongino said. He denied there was a culture of partying inside the agency.

Top US military officer: 'We let the boss down' over prostitute scandal

A decade ago, however, U.S. News and World Report published an investigative report detailing criminal activity and extreme partying as well as oversight problems. In one reported incident, members of Vice President Dick Cheney's security detail got into a brawl outside a bar on a trip to the San Diego area.

As the agency sought to rebuild its image, other high-profile incidents with presidential protection brought more scrutiny.

In 2008, an Iraqi journalist threw shoes at President George W. Bush during a Baghdad visit.

And in November 2009 three people crashed a White House state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Michaele and Tareq Salahi and Carlos Allen were able to get past Secret Security agents at the door and enter the party.

The Salahis even met Obama and had their picture taken with Vice President Joe Biden. In a January 2010 congressional hearing on the matter, the Salahis, who have since divorced, refused to testify, invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The prostitution scandal, however, has brought far more intense focus on the Secret Service and behavior by its agents and officers.

"This really is the biggest scandal in the history of the Secret Service," Ron Kessler, author of "In the President's Secret Service," told NBC News earlier this week. He said the agency's problems are deeply rooted.

"There's a culture in the Secret Service that's fostered by the management of just nodding, winking, favoritism," he said. "What the agency needs is an outside director who can come in, clean house, change the standards."

Michael Isikoff is NBC News' national investigative correspondent; Jim Miklaszewski is NBC News' chief Pentagon correspondent. NBC News Correspondent Luke Russert and msnbc.com reporter Jeff Black also contributed to this report.

[Neil]

The forum was better before this thread was started.  This lame shit is what we have the mainstream entertainment media for.  If I wanted useless bullshit stories about imagined misconduct, I'd watch CNN.

[CountDeMoney]

Hey man, he's your lapdog.  You've let him turn this place into MSNBC.com for years by shitting obvious news all over the place, and now you're surprised he's making pooh in the corner?

[jimmy olsen]

Tonitrus asked for it.

[DGuller]

Sailors sleeping with prostitutes?  What has the world come to? 

[Ideologue]

Man, if you can't do hookers in Colombia, what do you even want a security clearance for?

[The Brain]

Sailors sleeping with prostitutes?  What has the world come to? 

These days they allow heterosexuals.

[grumbler]

Tonitrus asked for it.

You are the only person I know who thinks that the word "irony" just means "the opposite of wrinkly."

[PDH]

Tonitrus asked for it.

You are the only person I know who thinks that the word "irony" just means "the opposite of wrinkly."

Blackadder : Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?
Baldrick : Yeah! It's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron.

[mongers]

I'd say these guys have a strong case for bringing a class action against these prostitutes, after all the one thing they didn't get was a 'secret service' 

[HVC]

Always pay the whores. Although washington is advancing. Couple of decades ago this would be the dead hooker scandal.

[CountDeMoney]

Secret Service scandal: Rising supervisor set uncovering of misconduct in motion

By Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura, Updated: Saturday, April 21, 6:47 PM

Paula Reid, the new Secret Service boss for the South American region, was in Cartagena, Colombia, preparing for the president's visit when she received an urgent report: A prostitute, upset because she had not been paid by a Secret Service agent, had created a disturbance in a nearby hotel, knocking on doors and yelling in the hallways at daybreak.

With roughly 24 hours left until President Obama was due to arrive in town, the 46-year-old Calvert County native instructed her staff to swoop into the Hotel Caribe at midday April 12 and inspect hotel registration records for all Secret Service employees. Reid, who had been staying at a nearby hotel, swiftly rounded up 11 agents and officers and ordered them out of the country. She alerted her superiors that she found early evidence of "egregious" misconduct involving prostitutes and set in motion the public uncovering of the most wide-reaching scandal at the agency in decades, according to government officials involved in the case.

It fell to Reid, recently promoted to head the prestigious Miami office, to ride herd on a rowdy group of male colleagues, including two who were assigned to supervise the group, the morning after a drunken bender, according to the officials. While the sordid and salacious details of the men taking prostitutes to their rooms are now well documented, less is known about the role played by one of the agency's highest-ranking African Americans in making the clock-ticking decision to replace them on an assignment for which there is no room for error.

For Reid, the moment was not without risk, opening her to a potential internal backlash for ruining the men's careers and, once the news became public, embarrassing an agency that prides itself on maintaining a stoic public face. Officials familiar with the probe said Reid had Director Mark Sullivan's endorsement as she took swift steps to handle the matter, but some agents said another senior manager might have been less aggressive.

Those who know Reid said the move revealed a steely resolve that has marked her 21-year rise through the ranks of an agency whose macho reputation has again come under scrutiny. Her story offers a counterbalance to critics who contend the Secret Service has been slow to clean up its act from the "Mad Men"-era days when some agents joked that their off-duty mantra was "wheels up, rings off."

Not that Reid, an intensely private person, would admit it. In an interview, she offered few new details of her role, sticking to what colleagues described as her businesslike approach.

"I am confident that as an agency we'll determine exactly what happened and take appropriate action," she said in the interview with her and an agency spokesman. "Despite this current challenge facing the Secret Service, my job is to keep Miami personnel focused on our core protective and investigative missions. Anything less is counterproductive to the many critical functions we perform each day."

Reid is still in the thick of it, assisting in the investigation. Those who have worked with her since she joined the Secret Service in 1990 described her as well suited for the challenge.

One former agent who worked with Reid in Miami during her previous stint in that bureau said she was exacting in the extreme, able to quote the agency administrative manual the way "fundamentalists quote the Bible." This ex-colleague said that he did not always agree with her management approach but that he respected her work ethic and ability.

"If every boss was Paula Reid, the Secret Service would never have a problem," the former agent said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about a former colleague. "It would be a lot more boring, but never a problem."

Reid has never married. She describes herself as very close to her siblings, including her twin sister, and her family, most of whom still live in the Maryland suburbs.

Tall and lean, Reid is regularly seen at the gym at 5:30 in the morning and at her desk by 7 a.m. She is always serious when on the job, the former agent said.

After growing up in Calvert County, Reid graduated from the University of Maryland. She joined the Secret Service at age 25 after visiting an NAACP job fair that sought to encourage minority applicants for law enforcement jobs.

According to a promotional interview years later that Reid granted to help recruit more female agents, she studied criminal justice in college and was debating whether to go to law school or become an investigator when she chose the service.

"I can't imagine not being in law enforcement," she said then, according to the interview, published in an online newsletter, Women for Hire.

Reid's time in the agency has not been rosy throughout.

Ten years after entering the service at the bottom rung, she joined as a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that claimed the agency engaged in racial discrimination against African American personnel. She provided a declaration giving examples of ways black agents were relegated to lesser assignments. In the broader suit, some of the plaintiffs contended that senior managers had often used racial epithets to describe criminal suspects but were not reprimanded for their comments.

She eventually withdrew from the case, which continues but has since dwindled to a smaller number of plaintiffs. Still, as a black woman, Reid stood out in a mostly white-male agency.

"The general public is intrigued to see a black female in my position," she said in the Women for Hire interview. "They always need to confirm that I really am a special agent. I enjoy being a role model for women and minorities."

In a 1997 USA Today interview about the Secret Service's desire to recruit more female agents, Reid was quoted as saying that when she and male agents were working together on an assignment, their managers would usually ignore her in favor of her male counterparts.

Until the perception of agents as big, bulky men changes, Reid said at the time, women have to "learn not to take it personally."

Whatever the challenges, Reid has earned a steady stream of promotions. After spending time as a special agent on the presidential protective detail, Reid joined management as a supervisor in the Miami field office in 2004, overseeing administrative duties. In 2007, she was summoned back to Washington, where she had two prominent jobs in the next four years.

She was special agent in charge of the protective intelligence and assessment division, which ensures that threats to the president and other officials are identified and carefully monitored, and she was deputy special agent in charge of the presidential protective division, overseeing the White House complex and access to it in the middle of Obama's term. That included overseeing protection for the East Wing, coordinating events and regular contact with first lady Michelle Obama and her family.

Reid's most recent promotion, this year, was to the highly coveted position of top boss of the Miami office, a division of more than 150 employees that oversees the South America region and rivals the Los Angeles and New York offices in prestige among national bureaus.

Her move prompted grumbling among some longer-serving white supervisors that she was unqualified, according to people with knowledge of the situation, including a former agent who left recently. A lot of the "good old boys" were not happy, said the former agent, who, because of the sensitive nature of personnel decisions, asked not to be identified.

This month, Reid headed to Cartagena to serve as liaison between the dozens of agents and officers representing several divisions of the Secret Service and the other local governments and U.S. agencies involved in preparing for the president's visit, Secret Service officials said.

Even under ideal circumstances, such a job is a headache of tight scheduling within a vast operation that includes several hundred personnel in a foreign country. But some said they could have predicted — before Reid took the call that set in motion the frantic chain of events ahead of Obama's arrival in Cartagena — that this is how she would have performed.

"She's the ultimate boss for that whole region," one agent said. "You did it in her house, so you better know she's going to come down hard."

[Razgovory]

I'm happy that I'm not the only one who isn't particularly bothered by this.  You'd think the guys murdered the hookers.

[chipwich]

Well what if the prostitutes were superspies who would mind control the agents?