What did they know…
…and when did they known it?:
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 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.”…
Whether the White House volunteer, Jonathan Dach, was involved in wrongdoing in Cartagena, Colombia, remains unclear. Dach, then a 25-year-old Yale University law student, declined to be interviewed, but through his attorney he denied hiring a prostitute or bringing anyone to his hotel room. Dach has long made the same denials to White House officials.
This is the way they roll. This is the way they’ve always rolled.
It’s not really about whether Dach was actually guilty or not, although of course that’s relevant. But as is often said, it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup:
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.
A Yalie with a whore?
Never!
I was in the navy and if we got rid of every sailor that saw a prostitute there wouldn’t have been enough people left to operate the ship. When we deployed to beautiful SE Asia, AKA Vietnam, some sailors would remove their wedding ring so that white line on the ring finger would tan.
Marine General Predicts Massive Flood of Infected Illegals Into USA When Ebola Reaches Central America
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=123359
The word on the Web is that Hilton pulls IDs on all whores and that a known, local, whore was let into Dach’s room at 12:04AM.
(Time stamped, to boot)
Similar house rules obtain in Las Vegas, too.
Only well behaved whores are allowed into the casinos.
So the SS investigation was brief and to the point. They didn’t need Columbo to figure matters out.
As you’d expect, there’s plenty of video coverage, too. No modern hotel lacks video coverage… if only for legal cover against bogus lawsuits.
Art…
The only thing that would put a hitch in their travel: ebola is a crippler.
What we should expect is that they show up asymptomatic — and then ‘blossom’ during food preparation at the local beanery.
What could go wrong?
We are all in the Not Surprised group.
While I question the timing of this story, since it knocks other more serious Obama failures in progress off of the front pages and opinion shows, it really captures so many of Obama’s failures.
*SS advance team acting like frat boys – They didn’t just use hookers, they brought them back to their hotel rooms containing equipment and other materials, and then didn’t pay them!
*As with every other Obama scandal, they rewarded loyalty and threw some lower-level staff under the bus.
*Hired the first woman SS Director for show and buried the rest.
*…Resulting in low morale amongst the remaining SS agents and a string of SS mistakes.
Things like this rarely happen in well-managed organizations. But this is an administration that puts campaign van drivers in the Situation room during the Benghazi attack and believes they can effect real-world change via twitter hashtag campaigns.
Who cares? Why care? What difference does it make?
The dictators rule us by already ruling the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy therefore will do nothing against its masters, and ours. The pay is too good.
Same with the voters. Their pay is also very good and so they elect the dictators – to take money from us and redistribute it to them.
There is no winning this war of the few against the many without massive struggle and brutal honesty
The press already has copies of Mr. Dach’s hotel bill with a copy of the prostitute’s photo id attached. You missed the best parts. Dach was interviewed, took NO lie detector test and the white house keeps saying he never did anything. Who can lie the loudest?
Also, you might look at what Mr Dach is doing now – He is working as an advisor for some form of gender equity at the White House. His father was a Walmart exec and big contributor. He is now working at either HHS or the White House on the next phase of Obamacare. It is wonderful how they can keep it all in the family.
Neo is right, though. The lies and coverup are the worst aspects.
Can we survive for 2 more years without a revolt?
Undoubtedly the moral of the Secret Service Agents has been very low ever since this happened. Under the circumstances the next head of the secret service will have a difficult time correcting the problems in the Secret Service.
Finally, a scandal RINOs can fixate on involving the really big issues. Nevermind a dirty tricks IRS, a turnkey tyranny NSA or an alphabet soup of bureaucracies that are regulating us into the poorhouse. Twenty years ago, the Republican establishment sidelined the effective “Contract with America” in order to focus on Slick Willie’s willie. If one Republican mentions this loose screw on the Titanic, throw him overboard.
As both Ace and Insty noted, the most important aspect of this little imbroglio is this:
If they’re willing to lean on, and even strong-arm, independent investigators over a meaningless nothingburger like this, what would they NOT try to cover up and silence?
Lizzy Says:
October 9th, 2014 at 4:07 pm
Brilliant post, Lizzy. Perfectly description of the most un-serious administration in US history.
They had to get Republicans in the past on the cover up, because the crime didn’t exist. Unless you define crime as “everyone in DC does it”.
So that’s why the media focused on the cover up, because the actual scandal was manufactured, fake essentially.
With the left, you don’t need to manufacture fake scandals. Whatever evil people think the Leftist alliance does… doesn’t actually scratch the surface.
Like others here, I question the timing… not only in terms of other scandals brewing (and boiling over) for the Obama Administration, but also in terms of the White House’s increasingly difficult relationship with the Secret Service.
(Talk about unforced errors! How difficult is it to stay on the good side of the people sworn to take a bullet for you?? But President Obama has apparently done just that… and now their relationship is borderline adversarial, with the Secret Service barely managing to protect the President’s life, and the White House throwing them under the bus with nary a care.)
President Obama has long seemed to me to be an interesting sort — the kind of guy who never cares about stepping on his allies, because a few smiles and nice-sounding phrases will fix everything right up. (That’s how it’s always worked for him. The same sort of person usually believes in talking to one’s enemies, because they feel they can sweet-talk their way out of anything. Sound familiar?)
The problem is that, sooner or later, you burn one bridge too many… and find that you need an ally, but that ally is not returning your calls.
It seems pretty stupid to shaft the people who are protecting you; the people you expect to die for you. They’re human beings, too. So, maybe the Secret Service looked the other way when the guy with the knife jumped over the White House fence?
Talk about unforced errors! How difficult is it to stay on the good side of the people sworn to take a bullet for you??
Somewhat difficult if they were programming the SS to off any future American patriots in the Office.
They wouldn’t want a patriotic, competent, loyal, or disciplined force then. They would want a corrupt one, one where they can blackmail and insert inside agents.
This is my first time pay a visit at here and
i am in fact impressed to read everthing at one place.
Hardly news. If they ever get to interview Obama’s male prostitute, that would be a story.