Free Republic

At first, this story from the Washington Post seems impossible to believe. After all, the White House insists that they were cleared of any involvement in the Cartagena prostitute scandal by, er, their own internal investigation — a claim that White House aide Eric Schultz repeated to the Post’s Carol Leonnig and David Nakamura. That settles it, right? Wrong: 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...

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...

It shouldn’t be surprising that Republicans are just as angry as Michelle Obama is reported to have been about the Secret Service’s failure to keep an intruder out of the White House, and its four-day failure to realize that a sniper’s gunshots hit the first family’s residence. Not everybody evidently feels this way when a Republican is in the White House. The New York Times movie critic’s verdict on the 2006 movie: “‘The Death of a President’ is, in the end, neither terribly outrageous nor especially heroic; it’s a thought experiment that traffics in received ideas.” ... If Baker thinks...

samples:  TV Tropes,  Deviant Art,  WaPo

"Even opposition lawmakers who have spent the last six years fighting his every initiative have expressed deep worry for his security." So wrote the New York Times' Peter Baker in the lead paragraph of a story on the congressional hearing on the Secret Service. Baker is an excellent reporter and a good writer, and so it's useful to consider the implications of his framing of the story. And let's leave aside his hyperbole about Republicans opposition "every initiative" -- some presidential initiatives are uncontroversial and widely supported -- and look at that word "even." Contained within that word and in...

A top Secret Service agent who has regularly served on President Obama’s protective detail had his gun stolen out of his car at his house after leaving it there overnight and was never disciplined for it, according to two sources with detailed knowledge of the incident.Internal Secret Service records show that the agency reported that the agent in question lost a semi-automatic handgun in 2009, but he was never punished for it, the two sources said.At the time of the gun theft, the agent was assigned to the Secret Service’s inspection division, which collaborates with the Office of Professional Responsibility...

Julia arrived amidst a flurry of HOPE and expectations.Unfortunately things didn’t work out as well as we’d HOPEd and last week the Administration’s girl Director of Secret Service, Julia Pierson, stepped down due to creative differences. As an “unnamed official” told the Washington Post, she apparently had a different vision for the Service that clashed with the one that included protecting the President and his family. “In the spring, Pierson was irate at what she considered the excessive security measures her team had planned for the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, which Obama hosted this summer, demanding that it dismantle extra layers...

CHICAGO — Just over a month until Election Day, President Obama is returning to a theme he hoped to make a centerpiece of the midterm campaign: the economy. Multiple crises overseas, the resignation of the Secret Service’s director after eye-popping threats to presidential safety, and the first case of Ebola in the United States have all kept Mr. Obama in a reactive mode. But in a speech Thursday at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., the president will go on the offensive and highlight the strides the economy has made since the near-economic collapse he inherited in 2009. He will also...

Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland was at the grocery store the other day when he ran into an elderly black woman who expressed growing concern about President Obama’s safety. Why, she asked, wasn’t he being better protected by his Secret Service agents? The furor that led to this week’s resignation of the director of the Secret Service resonated deeply among blacks, outraged that those supposed to be guarding the first black president were somehow falling down on the job — and suspicious even without evidence that it may be deliberate. “It is something that is widespread in black circles,”...

Deadly, irrational, and determined, the intruder snuck across a weakened perimeter. Eluding capture, the intruder was detained only after missteps and close calls. The spin began soon after the threat was isolated. Information was selectively leaked. Half-truths and untruths were uttered. Responsibility was avoided; privileges and credentials asserted; authority reasserted. Trust us. Remain calm. Don’t panic. This is the template of recent events. A mental case jumps the White House fence. He makes it to the East Room before he’s tackled by an off-duty Secret Service agent. Initial statements turn out to be misleading or false. We discover that lapses...

The White House sprayed by bullets. A hospital guard with a criminal record and a gun the Secret Service didn't know about riding on an elevator with the president in Atlanta. The fence-jumper who made it all the way into the East Room of the White House. Secret Service Director Julia Pierson had no choice but to resign on Wednesday afternoon. She did it a week or two late, but she did the right thing. The vaunted federal agency -- whose core duty is to protect the president of the United States, his family and his home - has become...

WASHINGTON — Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland was at the grocery store the other day when he ran into an elderly black woman who expressed growing concern about President Obama’s safety. Why, she asked, wasn’t he being better protected by his Secret Service agents? The furor that led to this week’s resignation of the director of the Secret Service resonated deeply among blacks, outraged that those supposed to be guarding the first black president were somehow falling down on the job — and suspicious even without evidence that it may be deliberate. “It is something that is widespread in...

Whole lotta lefty hacks out there today grumbling that the axe fell quickly for Julia Pierson only because she’s a woman. Supposedly, there’s a “glass cliff” phenomenon at work in which women executives are brought in to clean up a man’s mess and then, if they haven’t done it in some impossibly limited timeframe, they’re unfairly purged. Three problems with that. One: Per Ian Tuttle, Pierson wasn’t the first choice for the job last year. A man, former agent David O’Connor, was. Setting up Pierson for sexist reasons to take the fall for a hopeless salvage operation must have been...

Secret Service agents are like "glorified mall cops," Meghan McCain railed Thursday in a withering blast of the beleaguered law-enforcement agency following a series of security foul-ups. The 29-year-old author and TV personality – the daughter of former GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona – rattled off the reasons for her utter disdain on Pivot’s "TakePart Live." A video was posted on The Hill. "One of my friends called them glorified mall cops and I don't think that's terribly far off," she said. "I found them cliquey, I hated all of them, I had really bad experiences, and...

A man who jumped the White House fence allegedly knocked over a female officer at the mansion's double doors before he dashed into the ornate East Room. An inquiry continues into how Omar Gonzalez, 42, made it into the White House. Investigators are looking through an elaborate closed-circuit video system showing the entire incident, a Secret Service source told CNN. Authorities said the Iraq war veteran had a knife in his pocket when he ran into the White House, where he was later subdued after a wild chase. The officer he met at the doorway got up, chased him and...

As scandal continues to envelop the Secret Service, InsideSources has learned of a security failure leading up to the 2012 election. Multiple sources inside the Romney presidential campaign confirm that a Secret Service agent provided details of President Obama’s schedule several days prior to the President’s campaign stops becoming public. While sources involved in other presidential campaigns tell InsideSources that Secret Service detail assigned to each campaign will sometimes disclose private and personal information about those they are assigned to protect to opposing campaign staff, this instance in particular is very revealing of failures inside the Secret Service. In the...

A former Secret Service agent told MailOnline that rank-and-file thought Julia Pierson 'was a joke from Day One' Secret Service supervisor said 'she doesn't know anything about security planning in a post-9/11 world' Another said she discussed making the elite corps that guards the president and his family 'more like Disney World' and 'more friendly' She shrunk the White House's countersurveillance force and reduced numbers of uniformed agents who guard the mansion's perimeter 'Cutting down the size of the White House perimeter detail was a morale-killer and I think it came back to bite her,' he said

President Obama this week committed professional suicide. Let me explain. There is a theory in politics that once a leader has fired 50 or more people from his or her administration, he or she is finished. The reason being that by creating so many enemies ‘outside the tent’, the tent itself becomes too deluged with poisonous bile to avoid sinking into a quagmire of back-stabbing ignominy. Obama went a lot further than firing 50 people. He managed to single-handedly alienate 200,000 employees in the American intelligence agencies by going on 60 Minutes and ruthlessly chucking them all under a bus...

Behind the shocking revelations of incompetence and unprofessionalism that rocked the Secret Service this week is a longtime reporter who has been diligently uncovering the agency's secrets for years. Carol Leonnig, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who has worked at The Washington Post for nearly 15 years, has broken almost every single story on the agency, a series of shocking reports that on Wednesday resulted in the abrupt resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson. (Pierson called the resignation “painful.”) In less than a week, Leonnig uncovered three scandals that pushed the agency’s first female leader out the door. First,...

The United States Secret Service (USSS) is in a slump. The Secret Service used to be part of the Treasury Department. That was because, when the Service was established in 1865, "one-third to one-half" of all currency in circulation in the United States was counterfeit. What with this being just three months after the end of the Civil War, and all, the Secret Service's job was to put a stop to that. Presidential protection began as an "informal" part of the Service's duties in 1894 in President Grover Cleveland's second (and, as you remember, non-consecutive) term. The Secret Service...