by Susan Crabtree
A Secret Service agent has been accused of sexually assaulting a staffer who works for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to four sources in the Secret Service community.
The incident in question took place sometime over the last week during a trip devoted to providing advance security work and planning for a Harris campaign event in Wisconsin that ultimately did not take place. Several Harris staffers and Secret Service agents were in Green Bay to provide advance security and other planning for an upcoming Harris campaign event. The Harris campaign opted to go to Atlanta instead of Wisconsin on Friday, Sept. 20.
The special agent in question and several Harris staffers were dining and drinking alcohol at a local restaurant after wrapping up work for the day. The group went back to the Harris staffer’s hotel room when the Secret Service agent in question allegedly forced himself on the woman staffer, groping her in the process – actions that were apparently witnessed by other people present.
One source in the Secret Service community said the accused agent was so inebriated that he was kicked out of his hotel room by co-workers and passed out in the hallway, where photos were taken of him.
After learning of the incident, top Secret Service officials summoned the accused agent to agency headquarters in D.C. and ordered him to meet Monday with investigators in the Inspections Division, the department that handles investigations into disciplinary matters.
“The U.S. Secret Service Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating a misconduct allegation involving an employee,” a Secret Service spokesman said in a statement to RCP. “The Secret Service holds its personnel to the highest standards. The employee has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.”
A Harris spokesperson provided a statement to RCP but did not respond to a number of detailed questions about the incident and Harris’ staff’s handling of it.
“The Office of the Vice President takes the safety of staff seriously,” the spokesperson said. “We have zero tolerance for sexual misconduct. Senior OVP officials were alerted by the USSS about an incident involving an agent and informed that USSS initiated an investigation. The Office of the Vice President will not be releasing further information.”
Whether the agent’s actions constitute sexual assault is a determination for a court of law. At the minimum, however, the agent almost certainly violated internal agency rules aimed at cracking down on alcohol-fueled misconduct.
At the very least, the Secret Service agent likely broke a prohibition on drinking alcohol within 10 hours of reporting for duty. (The Secret Service also prohibits the consumption of any alcohol at the hotel in which a president or other top protectee is staying once the president or the protectee has arrived. In this case, it was a planning trip without Harris present, so that rule does not apply.)
The sexual assault allegation is the latest misconduct complaint against the agency. It also comes at a time of intense scrutiny of the Secret Service, when Congress and the public are questioning whether the agency has what it takes to protect former President Trump, President Joe Biden, Vice President Harris, and other protectees after two assassination attempts against Trump in nearly two months.
Bipartisan members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released a 94-page interim report Wednesday morning that found that the myriad Secret Service failures ahead of and during the Butler rally were “entirely foreseeable, preventable, and directly related to the events resulting in the assassination attempt that day.” The committee, which reviewed 2,800 pages of documents and conducted 12 transcribed interviews with Secret Service personnel responsible for the planning and security of the Butler rally, found that there was a lack of a clear line of responsibility and chain of command for the rally’s security.
“USSS advance agents told the Committee that planning and security were made jointly, with no specific individual responsible for approval,” the report stated.
The Secret Service team assigned to the Butler rally also failed to ensure that the AGR building, where shooter Thomas Crooks opened fire on Trump and the crowd, was “effectively covered” and failed to “effectively coordinate with state and local law enforcement.” The report states that the USSS agents in charge of the rally’s security did not provide specific instructions for covering the AGR building, including the positioning of the snipers, who were located inside the building and not on top of it.
“Every single one of those failures was preventable, and the consequences of those failures were dire,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and the chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, told reporters Tuesday in advance of the report’s release.
Democrats and Republicans on the committee disagreed on whether Congress should provide additional resources to the Secret Service to help solve ongoing manpower shortages and other communications and resource deficiencies and failures that Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe has pinned on a lack of funding. The current continuing resolution to fund the government until Dec. 20 includes $230 million in supplemental funding for the Secret Service to help protect candidates for the remaining months of the election and into next year.
“I agree that bad behavior should be corrected, but I think the report clearly points to the need for more resources,” Blumenthal added. “The Secret Service ought to have the equipment it needs in an age of artificial intelligence and other technology.”
But, Blumenthal argued, “It’s not just about the money, it’s also about management.”
Rep. Rand Paul, ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, called for a wholesale leadership change at the top levels of Secret Service management. Anything short of that, he said, including throwing more money at the problem, would do no good.
“Whoever was in charge of security during the recent assassination attempt, these people can’t be in charge,” Paul said. “There’s so many human errors. No amount of money that you give to the Secret Service is going to alleviate the human errors if you leave the same humans in charge who made these terrible, dramatic mistakes with regard to security … there has to be more repercussions.”
After the assassination attempt, RealClearPolitics reported that a Secret Service special agent, while preparing for Trump’s minutes-way arrival in North Carolina, left her post to breastfeed her child and did so in a restricted room reserved for emergencies involving the former president and other official USSS business. A different Secret Service special agent partially responsible for developing the plan to secure the Butler rally where former President Trump was nearly assassinated also is under internal review for posting videos and photos from her protective assignments to social media, including photos from Mar-a-Lago.
Early Sunday morning, a Uniformed Division officer shot himself in the foot in a non-life-threatening mistake while in his vehicle outside the Israeli ambassador’s residence in Northwest Washington, D.C. Some agents based the “negligent discharge” on a lack of gun training. All gun carriers working for the agency in the National Capital Region pre-COVID were required to do gun training once a month, and the Presidential Protective and the Vice President Protective Divisions are still required to do so, while the Uniformed Division and others train with their guns less frequently, sources tell RCP.
Even before this summer’s assassination attempts, there were warning signs of trouble within the agency. A female Secret Service agent had a mental breakdown at Joint Base Andrews, home to Air Force One and Air Force Two, the call signs of the two jets that transport the president and vice president around the world. She physically attacked her supervisor while her gun remained in her holster. Other Secret Service agents present wrestled her to the ground and removed her gun before other agency employees removed her from the base and Secret Service leaders placed her on medical leave.
Whistleblowers blame at least some of the problems plaguing the agency on the lowering of hiring standards in recent years in a greater push to make up for years of manpower shortage. They also point to former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle’s emphasis on DEI hiring practices, while others cite deep-seated long-term problems, including nepotism and other non-merit-based favoritism and corner-cutting in hiring.
The Secret Service rule restricting alcohol use within 10 hours of agents and officers reporting to duty was put in place in the wake of the 2012 scandal when several Secret Service agents solicited prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia – where the sex trade is legal – while preparing for a presidential visit.
Despite the new alcohol rules, in 2014, the Secret Service agents responsible for protecting President Obama in Amsterdam were sent home and placed on administrative leave after a night of drinking, the Washington Post reported. Afterward, one of the agents was found passed out in a hotel hallway. Upon finding the unconscious agent in the morning, the hotel called the U.S. embassy in the Netherlands.
– – –
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ national political correspondent.
Photo “Secret Service Agent” by Anthony Quintano. CC BY 2.0.
.jpg){kind=link}